Claude Chabrol is up to his usual tricks in his second Ruth Rendell adaptation (after La cérémonie/The Ceremony) called La demoiselle d’honneur (The Bridesmaid). The French director’s mystery involves a handsome young man with a bad taste in women: he likes his mother and the impetuous Stéphanie, who proposes they each murder someone (anyone!) to prove their love for one another. He is also obsessed with a stone bust that looks a little bit like both women and which the young man takes with him to bed. Is he dreaming all this up or should he see a psychiatrist? People who like their mysteries to remain just that (and who have a patient nature to boot) could enjoy La demoiselle d’honneur as a minor entry in Chabrol’s notoriously uneven filmography.

Philippe (Benoît Magimel, the student from Haneke’s La pianiste/The Piano Teacher) is a salesman with steely blue eyes who works for a dealer in bathroom appliances. At the wedding of his younger sister he meets the bridesmaid Stéphanie, a probable cousin of the groom (not even the groom seems really sure; "She’s a bit weird, but don’t pay any attention" he says). She changes her name every six months, and when Philippe first meets her she likes to be called Senta. Philippe is immediately taken with her, probably because he recognises something of his own family in her icy blue eyes.

The criminal aspects in the story at first seem like a typical Rendell twist by way of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (which also inspired Hitchcock’s film of the name). The big difference here is that the murders are not an end in themselves but just a means of expressing their love. In both stories one of the murderers is an unhappy participant in the scheme: in La demoiselle d’honneur this is Philippe, whose willingness to please his Senta -- for whom he has come to feel so much in so little time -- does not extend to murder, though he is willing to "adopt" the unsolved murder of a tramp that lived on Senta’s property to make her happy. Things become complicated when Senta insists she do the same for him.

The film is shot by cinematographer Eduardo Serra, known for his work on the lush period films Wings of the Dove and Girl With a Pearl Earring. In the contemporary setting of La demoiselle d’honneur, his work is equally stunning. In an early sequence that establishes the probably a little too intimate relationship with his mother, we get a close-up of Philippe’s face shot over the shoulder of his mother, who is standing in front of him and whose hair is a blur on the right side of the screen. The moment is the first in the film that pays particular attention to Philippe’s features and particularly his eyes -- their colour seems to radiate an intensity that has influenced the entire colour palette of the film, which is dominated by icy blues, cold greys and verdant greens.

The film uses classical suggestive camera-angles and standard musical cues (written by Chabrol’s son Matthieu) from the thriller genre to create an ominous atmosphere that is more akin to morbid fascination than actual suspense. The real meat of the story is in the character of the uptight Philippe, whose taste in women may be bad, but whose own unresolved issues may be worse.

Benoît Magimel (Philippe Tardieu), Laura Smet (Stéphanie "Senta" Bellange), Aurore Clément (Christine), Bernard Le Coq (Gérard Courtois),
Solène Bouton (Sophie Tardieu), Anna Mihalcea (Patricia Tardieu), Michel Duchaussoy (Le clochard), Suzanne Flon (Madame Crespin), Eric Seigne (Jacky), Pierre-François Dumeniaud (Nadeau), Philippe Duclos (Capitaine Dutreix), Thomas Chabrol (Lieutenant José Laval), Isolde Barth (Rita as Isild Barth), Mazen Kiwan (Pablo), Chantal Banlier (La caissière épicerie), Jacqueline Cassard (Madame Bertillon), Brigitte Chamarande (Madame Soupin).