Lucas Belvaux’s new drama Rapt comes at a timely moment for American audiences. 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. Based on the real-life story of Baron Édouard-Jean Empain, it tells of a prominent businessman whose debaucherous private life is exposed in the course of his kidnapping. Like those other publicized cases of private sins inadvertantly exposed, Rapt provokes an ambivalent mixture of sympathy and disgust, recreating with elegant realism both the selfishness of the central figure and the callousness of the media and its audience. But the film also offers something more. With great visual economy, an understated script, and a gripping, convicted performance from lead actor Yvan Attal, Rapt elides the personal and political strife of scandal into something more cohesive, more ambiguous, and ultimately, more real.
Attal plays Françoise Graff, president of a top French firm who keeps a high public profile even as he squanders his wealth on gambling, sport, and extramarital affairs. An opening montage establishes his lifestyle with rapid and simple snapshots: getting out of cars, leaving a business lunch early, meeting his mistress in an anonymous apartment. Then, just as quickly, he is kidnapped by masked men, clearly professionals, who cut off one of his fingers and send it to his family as leverage for a ransom they can’t pay. As the story spreads, the details of Graff’s private life come into the open. The backlash mounts. It becomes obvious that even if he survives the ordeal, Graff’s life will never be the same again.
As Graff’s image as a spoiled playboy solidifies with the public, his company, his friends, and even his family begin to question his loyalties. Belvaux maneuvers a neat reversal as the movie approaches its fascinating and conflicted conclusion, for while the police’s attempt to save his life climaxes, his personal life is disintegrating at an increasingly faster rate. Rapt never lingers too long on the individual threads of the plot, instead making the kidnapping and the rescue the centerpoint of a broader portrait, that of Graff himself. At first, it feels more thriller than drama, so well executed is Belvaux’s mix of crime, scandal, and family turmoil. But as the details accumulate and not only Graff’s but also his wife’s and his children’s personalities take shape, it becomes clear that there is more at stake in the outcome of the kidnapping than his physical safety.
Whether because of Belvaux and Attal’s painstaking craftmanship or simply because it has the poetic license of a work of fiction, Rapt rises above the finger pointing and stance taking that flood the papers, TV, and airwaves whenever a new political scandal hits the press. Without compromising any of the excitement or the hypocrisy often involved in a public figure’s downfall, Belvaux creates a more complex and more convincing account of it; he makes a fundamentally unlikeable man a fundamentally understandable one. Rapt isn’t the story of a villain humbled or a victim redeemed, but that of an unsolicited and unwelcome offer of redemption to an obstinate aristocrat, an opportunity for change that’s fraught with danger and resentment. It’s sad, yes, and also outrageous, but what makes Rapt great is that it’s ultimately very human.
