Chaos movie storyline. Paul and Hélène, a wealthy Parisian couple, are preparing to go out for the evening. While driving, they see three men chasing a prostitute down the street. She begs them to save her by letting her into the car, but Paul locks the doors and drives away as the three men savagely beat her, leaving her unconscious in the street. He refuses to let Hélène phone an ambulance, afraid of being charged with not helping a person in danger (which is a crime in France).
Hélène cannot forget the incident, and the next day she goes to the hospital, where she finds the prostitute, Noémie, in a coma. Moved, Hélène stops work and leaves her family responsibilities to stay with Noémie throughout her recovery, aiding her as she regains mobility and helping her to communicate since she can’t yet speak. When one of the pimps returns to threaten and beat Noémie again into submission, Hélène follows him out of the hospital, knocks him unconscious with a wooden plank, and leaves him for the police to find.
Chaos is a 2001 French comedy-drama film written and directed by Coline Serreau. It stars Vincent Lindon, Catherine Frot, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud, Aurélien Wiik, Ivan Franek, Michel Lagueyrie, Wojciech Pszoniak and Chloé Lambert. It was the third film that Vincent Lindon made under Coline Serreau’s direction, after La Crise in 1992 and La Belle Verte in 1996. Currently, a remake of this movie in English, to star Aishwarya Rai and Meryl Streep, is planned.
Film Review for Chaos
The vengeful, bewitching heroine of ”Chaos” goes by two names, Malika and Noémie. But as embodied by Rachida Brakni, who won a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) last year as the most promising actress, she is indelible either way. Against all odds this beautiful, street-smart survivor of countless rapes and assaults at the hands of a gang that enslaved her and forced her to work the streets of Paris as a prostitute has retained her fighting spirit, and sex is her weapon. When she aims her fiery gaze into a man’s eyes, he’s a goner.
A witchy, saucer-eyed waif with ivory skin and a head full of gleaming ebony tendrils, Malika proudly calls that gaze — a calculated blend of beseeching vulnerability and smoldering heat — the ”flamethrower.” Directed at unsuspecting targets like Paul (Vincent Lindon) and Fabrice (Aurélien Wiik), a spoiled Parisian father and son, both itching for a comeuppance, she reduces them to quivering, cow-eyed fools.
There is not a decent (or even half-decent) male character to be found in ”Chaos,” a gripping feminist fable with a savage comic edge, written and directed by Coline Serreau. To a person, the female characters are loyal, dependable and mutually supportive. The men are, at best, smug sexist pigs and at worst brutally abusive sadists. The film’s contempt for the male ego and sex drive is so unrelenting that ”Chaos” should leave many men feeling momentarily ashamed of their gender and many women fired up for domestic battle.
Because Malika is an Algerian who was sold by her father at age 16 to an older man, ”Chaos” is also an attack on Muslim laws and traditions that permit women to be treated as chattel. Where the movie threatens to capsize (it doesn’t quite) is in its depiction of French middle-class male attitudes as only marginally less oppressive.
The first spasm of rage is released in the opening scene in which a young prostitute being beaten up by three thugs pleads for help and bangs on the car driven by Paul and his wife Hélène (Catherine Frot), a middle-class couple on their way to a dinner party. Paul, wanting no hassles, angrily rolls up the windows and drives off in a hurry, annoyed that the car has been soiled with blood.
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But Hélène is conscience-stricken. The next day she tracks down the battered victim, Malika, who is hovering near death in a hospital. Even though she knows nothing about her, Hélène instinctively becomes Malika’s protector and takes a leave of absence from her job to care for her. While Malika is still unable to speak, two of her attackers visit the hospital to force her to sign a legal document. After barely rescuing her from their clutches, Hélène arranges for Malika to stay in the country with Paul’s mother, Mamie (Line Renaud).
The dramatic heart of the movie is Malika’s harrowing first-person account of her history, once she has recovered. After her father sold her to an Algerian businessman, she recalls, she ran away and lived on the streets until she was discovered by Touki (Ivan Franek), a pimp who befriended and then betrayed her. Imprisoned for two months in a school for prostitutes outside Paris, she was beaten and raped eight to 10 times a day and forcibly addicted to heroin.
But in the midst of her degradation, Malika hatched an elaborate escape plan. She enlists Hélène as a collaborator in the final phase of a scheme that has involved picking up tips on the stock market and high finance and using the flamethrower to seduce rich, dying old men. Even as you watch ”Chaos,” the details of the story strain credulity. The tale is best appreciated as a rip-roaring, but far-fetched, revenge fantasy.
The movie reserves its harshest contempt for Paul, the piggy middle-class businessman who refuses to help a woman in distress. It goes out of its way to observe how Paul (and his selfish son, Fabrice, who callously juggles two girlfriends) treat Hélène as a servant and housekeeper in her own home.
When Paul’s mother pays a surprise visit bearing a gift for him, he hides and insists Hélène cover for him. Everything you need to know about this preening narcissist can be gleaned by gazing into his cold fishy eyes, stagnant pools of blind self-adoration. Paul later falls madly in love with Malika, when (with Hélène’s approval) she seduces him in an airport and applies her formula for enslavement. That recipe intersperses intense ego-boosting bouts of sex with sudden, unexplained disappearances. It gives you a tinge of guilty pleasure to watch the poor man jump through her invisible hoops.
It should be instructive to see how American audiences react to ”Chaos.” At a moment when a Tarzan-and-Jane sexual ethos roars like a brushfire through a culture pondering the possibility of war, will the movie ring any bells?
Chaos (2001)
Directed by: Coline Serreau
Starring: Vincent Lindon, Catherine Frot, Rachida Brakni, Line Renaud, Aurélien Wiik, Ivan Franek, Michel Lagueyrie, Wojciech Pszoniak, Chloé Lambert
Screenplay by: Coline Serreau
Production Design by: Michèle Abbé-Vannier
Cinematography by: Jean-François Robin
Film Editing by: Catherine Renault
Costume Design by: Karen Muller Serreau
Music by: Saint Germain
Distributed by: StudioCanal
Release Date: October 3, 2001
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