Rapt
Time Out New York Project: Issue #820, July 7-13, 2011
★★★☆☆
Dir. Lucas Belvaux. 2009. N/R. 125mins. In French, with subtitles. Yvan Attal, Anne Consigny, André Marcon.
Has the Dominique Strauss-Kahn situation stirred your appetite for scandal? Lucas Belvaux’s solidly made thriller about a French industrialist whose dirty laundry is aired for all to see should satiate some of your tabloid cravings. The circumstances are very different, of course: Stanislas Graff (Attal) has his fair share of paramours, as well as an extravagant gambling addiction, but his indiscretions are tolerated by those around him until he is abducted by a team of professional kidnappers. Suddenly, this jet-setting businessman is cuffed and blindfolded, confined to cramped quarters and forced to write ransom notes — one of which contains a hastily removed bodily appendage.
Belvaux’s tension-building setup is stellar; the follow-through, less so. As Stanislas’s ordeal drags on, Rapt is bogged down in procedural rigmarole: Scenes of cops plotting, the family worrying (it’s wonderful to see Eric Rohmer muse Françoise Dorléac as the protagonist’s rich-bitch mother) and the paparazzi having a field day all blend monotonously together. Attal is terrific, pulling a Michael Fassbender–in-Hunger act to show the damaging psychological effects the kidnapping has on a man plucked from his glass-house comfort zone. Yet Belvaux never takes the material — especially its karmic gotcha of a finale — to the multifaceted heights that a suspense-minded filmmaker like Hitchcock or Polanski surely would. The craft is strong, but the spirit is lacking.—Keith Uhlich
