The Bridesmaid.

"The Bridesmaid certainly presents a looser, more relaxed Mr Chabrol, in both intellectual and formal terms, than do midcareer masterworks like Les Biches and later successes like La Cérémonie," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, where Terrence Rafferty profiles the director, calling him "a master of free-floating anxiety... Mr Chabrol has suffered, in a sense, from the sort of anxiety of identity that he has so often visited on the nervous middle-class people in his films. He has a reputation, a position: the world knows who he is, and what a movie with the Claude Chabrol brand should be. He isn't always so sure."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir finds The Bridesmaid to be "a prickly, twisted, mean-spirited, borderline crazy and highly seductive picture."

Updated through 8/14.

For Daniel Kasman, though, it "successfully walks the line between inspiring eroticism and thrills from its situation and prodding snickers out its audience... the film remains entrenched in its own low-keyness and seems to have little desire to be anything other than successfully amusing."

Meanwhile, for signandsight, Toby Axelrod translates Katja Nicodemus's piece on Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert for Die Zeit.

Update, 8/11: "[I]n a Chabrol film, and notably in The Bridesmaid, conversations almost never reach a comfortable plateau," writes the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle. "There's always something hanging over, some veiled hostility, some subtly expressed disdain. The suggestion of trouble is there, and then it evaporates, to become part of the gathering cloud hanging over the characters."

Update, 8/12: For the Nation's Stuart Klawans, it's "arguably a slight and anecdotal film by Claude Chabrol, but it comes all the same from the old master's hand."

Update, 8/14: "Going to a new Chabrol film these days is like sitting down with an old friend who will tell you another one of his stories," writes Stanley Kauffmann for the New Republic. "The Bridesmaid ranks high in the Chabrol roster."

Posted by dwhudson at August 9, 2006 3:52 PM