MovieChat Forums > La fleur du mal (2003) Discussion > what the old woman said...

what the old woman said...

posted 17 years ago by ownerbluesky
5 replies | jump to latest

i dunno a word of french, and still watched the movie!! would sb plz tell me what was the old woman narrating for the girl over the corpse? has she killed another person before, and why?

[–] shadow04-2 17 years ago

The old woman had killed her father after the war because he was a collaborator and had allowed her brother (who she was in love with!) to be killed when he was in the resistance.

[–] ownerbluesky 17 years ago

what is this incest motif doing in this movie? it seems under whatever thing that seems quite prim and proper, there lies a dark side...

[–] BringBackWriting 17 years ago

I think that Michelle and Francois are blood related. Aunt Line said that Michelle's father (deceased) and Francois mother (deceased) were very close. Francois also said he overheard his mother tell his father that he wasn't Francois father.

[–] littlelorenz 17 years ago

aunt line actually said that michelle's father and francois' mother were in love and having an affair (i'm pretty sure) so it is possible that michelle and francois are half brother and sister. which would fit so well with this movie.

[–] Artemis-9 13 years ago

By now, those who posted made it quite plain already.

Yet, those still interested in this, and who were not able to follow the dialogue in full, can find an elegant description of the plot, and how it fits in all fifty works of Claude Chabrol, in Roger Ebert's review here, in imdb:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20031107/REVIEWS/311070303/1023

The last reference he mades to «police coming up the stairs» is innacurate, though. Aunt Line confesses to Michèle having murdered her own father (three generations ago, the same crimes of which murder is the less horrendous), and demands that Michèle and her half-brother François keep her secret, thus transferring her own guilt to themselves... In exchange, Line is going to plead guilty for this last crime she did not commit - just covered up.

Yet, the arrival of the euphoric staff of the elected mayor, Anne Charpin-Vasseur, creates a diversion... and the three accomplices straighten their backs (literally) to entertain the group in a bourgeois manner, until they inform Anne that she got elected while Line killed her husband... in her daughter's bedroom!

You may notice that Michèle had chosen the theme of culpability transfer for her dissertaion in college (Psychology graduation), that being exactly the key to understand every which one of Claude Chabrol's films.