Issues of criminality, responsibility and victimhood get a muscular workout in Lucas Belvaux's taut French thriller "Rapt," based on a true story of the 1978 kidnapping of a rich industrialist.
When wealthy, arrogant business scion Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal) is grabbed by a crack team of abductors who ask for 50 million euros in ransom and send his severed finger as proof of their seriousness, the subsequent investigation - by authorities, his business partners and a rabid press corps - reveals an unflattering portrait of Graff's personal indiscretions (gambling, affairs) and professional acumen.
Suddenly a nail-biting, emotionally charged captivity policier - reminiscent of Kurosawa's crisp handling of the mechanics of ransom negotiation in "High and Low" - takes on a well-tailored political-economic-privacy dimension. Without forcing it, Belvaux juxtaposes the unquestionable cruelty of holding anyone against their will with the cold, socially accepted tactics of the boardroom, where a corporation's threatened health may get precedence over that of a brutalized if unlikable individual.
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Well-acted (by Attal notably, but also by Anne Consigny, as Graff's worried-yet-disgusted wife) and procedurally sleek, "Rapt" fuses strands of dramatic tension in a shrewd enough way that it even saves its sharpest cuts for the kidnapping's aftermath, when a well-heeled life laid bare must reconcile with a much different form of enforced solitude.
Review
Rapt
*** 1/2
• Not rated.
• Director: Lucas Belvaux.
• Cast: Yvan Attal, Anne Consigny.
• Running time: 120 minutes.
