Just after Weinergate, with the memory of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged offenses still fresh in our minds, Belvaux’s film provides plenty of cinematic food for thought.
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The final moments conclude the movie with an ingenious flourish. Lucas Belvaux’s new drama Rapt comes at a timely moment for American audiences. While he physically and mentally degenerates in imprisonment, the kidnappers, police and the board of the company of which he is director negotiate about the ransom.
The "suspense" sequences, with chases in cars and helicopters, appear to bear the influence of Michael Mann, but it is the calmer, more cerebral notes that are most successful: droll cogitations on hypocrisy, guilt and innocence, with satirical touches that resonate interestingly with this week's news stories about Nicolas Sarkozy and Liliane Bettencourt. A rich industrialist is brutally kidnapped. And so the crime itself criminalises Graff, turning a spotlight on everything questionable in his life and triggering a catastrophe in his marriage and his business affairs. The kidnapping fuels sensational press interest in his louche private life, with hints that Graff might even have staged a phoney kidnapping to solve his money worries.
Graff turns out to be far less rich personally than everyone had assumed. His family are horrified when Graff is kidnapped, but his company's board only agrees with some reluctance to "advance" his wife the kidnappers' colossal ransom demand from the firm's own finances. Yvan Attal plays Stanislas Graff, a wealthy businessman who moves in the highest political circles, and yet he is a secret womaniser and gambler who has lost vast amounts at cards.
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Rapt is his best film so far – an intriguing, elegant movie that is a knight's-move away from being a conventional thriller. As the unsavory details of a wealthy industrialist's personal life are revealed in the press upon his kidnapping, the urgency to free him disappears. He also directed the unwieldy 2006 crime drama The Law of the Weakest, a Full-Montyish story of unemployed guys having a crack at robbery. L ucas Belvaux is the Belgian actor-turned-director best known for his Trilogy of 2002: an ambitious, tricksy set of three separate but interlocking movies that formed a kind of Venn diagram of stories and characters.