Chaos dir. Coline Serreau

Opens Fri July 25 at the Varsity.

Chaos hardly lives up to its title. It is not chaotic at all but deeply structured, even superstructured, to such an extent that not one part of it, not one scene or moment or line of dialogue, is wasted. It is, in terms of plot and images, a thoroughly meaningful (or more accurately, meaning-full) movie.

The film begins with a seemingly chaotic incident--an acci- dental encounter between a modern French couple heading to some posh engagement, and an immigrant prostitute running from a pack of pimps. As the prostitute is captured by the pimps and beaten to a pulp, the male part of the French couple locks the car doors and departs. In the way certain physicists accelerate and collide atoms so as to see what they are made of, the accident of this sudden encounter between the unstable prostitute and stable wife is, for the director, Coline Serreau, the dynamite that blows into a thousand pieces the current state of male/female relationships in 21st-century France. But instead of rebuilding the parts to understand the composition of the current social order (which would not have been a bad thing), the director sets to rebuild from the ruins of the accident an alternate (but regrettably not original) social order.

Chaos should be called The Dialect, as it is structured by a system of opposing parts that work toward a unified whole (or utopia, which is precisely where the film ends, with the dialects at a final standstill on a sunny beach by the sea). The primary opposing parts of the movie are a French woman (Catherine Frot) who is passively limited and oppressed by the French men in her life, and an immigrant prostitute (Rachida Brakni) who is actively limited both by the pimps who use her body for pure profit and by her patriarchal Arab family, which does not recognize the rights or significance of women.

These primary opposing parts produce a series of further opposing parts that the film sets out to resolve: white/black, rich/poor, resident/immigrant, advanced/backward, and so on. The French woman is the one who initiates the movement that will resolve these differences. She goes to the hospital where what remains of the brutalized prostitute is on a life support system, then begins to take care of her, protecting her from her enemies, feeding her, helping her regain her strength and will. In the process, the French woman neglects her own family, and the men in her life soon learn that they took her for granted, that they can't function without her, and that their house is in fact ruled by the mother and not by the father.

At times funny (and most times silly), Chaos' plot resolves the differences between the two women to ultimately produce a disappointing fairyland of French female harmony. Disappointing because the fairyland is deeply flawed by the fact that its reality is borrowed from (or is a mere inversion of) the actual oppressive male order that the director set out to destroy. What the director should have done with this film is either, one, explore the society she exploded, or two, after the explosion not use the very pieces that once constituted the oppressive male order to formulate a female order. Then the film would have been something like we've never seen before--a whole new society created not from what remains but from nothing at all.