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Chaos (French) DVD avail in November.
Amazon.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/exec....9755540
Chaos [IMPORT]
List Price: CDN$ 39.21
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This title will be released on November 11, 2003. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives.
Editorial Reviews
Video Details
CHAOS is a rousing and daring tale combining aspects of pulse-pounding melodrama with loopy battle-of-the-sexes comedy. Helene and Paul, a bourgeois couple, are rushing to a dinner engagement when they see Malika, a young prostitute being chased by three men. As the thugs attack the woman, Paul immediately rolls up the windows and speeds off. Full of remorse, Helene tracks down Malika in the hospital. As Helene nurses Malika through her recovery, she realizes that her life has been changed forever. She can never return to her selfish husband and son.
Malika tells Helene a shocking story. She ran away from her family after her father sold her to an Algerian businessman. Homeless, living on the streets, she was turned into a sex slave by a vicious criminal organization. In the tense final act, Helene joins forces with Malika in an elaborate and daring scheme to double–cross her pimps and get both her freedom and her revenge.
Review
For the first two-thirds of this movie, writer-director Coline Serreau gives us an entertaining social critique that maintains a comic tone while making valid points about the psychological and physical abuse of women. The film has a serious message, but Serreau leavens it with enough humor and wry insights into her characters to keep her story from getting too heavy handed. Also, she balances the satire with moments that have emotional resonance; one example is the uncomfortable silence as a mother tries to form an emotional connection with her disinterested son in a cafeteria. Unfortunately, the film loses its comic tone when it takes a lengthy narrative digression into Noemie's (Rachida Brakni)'s background story. It feels almost as if a different movie was inserted into this one, and the story becomes a ham-fisted and somewhat far-fetched tale of a woman getting back at her one-dimensional, dehumanized male oppressors. The performances are still good and Serreau does manage to generate sympathy for the female characters, but her message might have been more compelling if it had been more subtle. ~ Todd Kristel, All Movie Guide
Synopsis
In this satirical comedy drama from France, white-collar workaholic Paul (Vincent Lindon) and his high-strung wife Helene (Catherine Frot) are driving to a party one evening when a young woman leaps into the path of their car, crying for help. Paul refuses to let her into the car, and soon several men catch up with the woman and begin beating her savagely. Paul insists on staying out of the matter, but Helene feels some sense of responsibility for what happened, and begins spending most of her time at the hospital where the woman remains unconscious. In time, it's determined that the woman's name is Noemie (Rachida Brakni), she's 22 years old, and works as a prostitute. By this time, Helene has become obsessed with protecting Noemie, and when a strange man (Wojtek Pszoniak) attempts to sign her out of the hospital, claiming he's her uncle, Helene sneaks Noemie out posing as a nurse and takes her to her mother-in-law's country house to recover. Eventually, Noemie is well enough to tell her harrowing story -- she was brought to France from Algeria by her father, along with her sister, and fell into life as a streetwalker shortly after learning that her family had sold her hand in marriage her to a man back in Algeria. Director Coline Serreau shot Chaos using digital video equipment -- and was impressed enough with the experience that she announced she had no interest in shooting on 35 mm film ever again. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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