gradyharp RAPT is more an experience than a film. It is based on the true story of the 1978 kidnapping of French industrialist Edouard-Jean Empain, a millionaire playboy who is abducted and held for ransom for 60 days. Though it is a very fine thriller of the kidnapping/ransom genre this film is far more than that. It is an exploration of the lives of men of wealth who allow their moneyed status to be able to buy anything, behave in any way they wish, and trample lives of family and friends in the process. Is it a pretty picture to follow? No, certainly not, but it is a revealing fact that a crime of kidnapping can be secondary to a life of greed and consumption of power and money that feeds into lives such as the main character of this film and the governmental agencies to respond differently to these moneyed moguls.Stanislaff Graff (Yvan Attal, in a mesmerizing role) is the wealthy industrialist married to the beautiful and wise Françoise (Anne Consigny), and also has a lover. He is kidnapped brutally from his limousine on the eve of his visit to China as part of the entourage of the French president. The kidnappers treat Graff cruelly, keeping him blindfolded and tied in a tiny tent in a dungeon of a basement: they demand a fifty million euro ransom. As an acct of proving their serious plot, they cut off one of his fingers. What follows is a terrifying sparring match between kidnappers, police and the board of the company of which Graff is the director. The main question for the board: is a human life worth more than fifty million euros? Will they be able to get that amount of money together in time anyway? While they decide this he degenerates physically and mentally in imprisonment. After sixty days Graff is released to a world now cognizant of his secret life of gambling and escapades and secret apartments that the press dredges up, revelations that are especially painful for his wife. Paying his ransom won't bury his secrets.This film was written and directed by Lucas Belvaux who presents his story with more emphasis on subterfuge and the psychological aspects of the affair that may make the film seem slow moving (125 minutes) but at film's end we realize that the true crime is not so much that of the kidnap/ransom but the abuse of power and money when so many in the world are suffering from homelessness and hunger and foreclosures etc. The drama is significantly heightened by the work of cinematographer Pierre Milon and the moody musical score by Riccardo Del Fra. This is a demanding film but an important one, and the acting of everyone in the large cast is on the highest level - especially the stunning performances by Yvan Attal and Anne Consigny. Grady Harp

Rogermex I think some of my good friends here with the other reviews need to watch the film again. Some, not all.Yes, it's a somewhat slow and quiet film, beautifully shot and acted. Though supposedly of some sort of "thriller" genre it is actually a "thrillingly" excellent character study. Not the sort of example of humanity that is gratifying to see however.The main character's kidnapping and two months in captive isolation are essentially a metaphor for his own solitary confinement in his cold narcissism. He is no less his own prisoner than if he had contrived the kidnapping himself, as the police have reason to suspect.When his wife, and daughters, seek some sort of contact and contrition from him for the fact that his betrayals are now a matter of public disgrace, he quite coldly declares that it is himself alone who deserves pity and solace, and that he will explain to no one. His faithful dog is treated with more affection and care.You would naively think that his "ordeal" would effect some sort of transformation of his personality. Sorry, personalities, especially this kind, do not change so easily. He loses one of his fingers, but otherwise is intact. (Want some cheap symbolism? The finger is gone, but he easily lights up that big cigar of self-indulgence.) He knows, and we know, that the kidnappers have left him with a means not just to satisfy them with his money, but to "do the right thing" in preventing the further violent mayhem they threaten. Innocents will be killed at random. He does have the money: his shares of the company have been sold and his lawyer congratulates him for how extremely wealthy he still is. The kidnappers want their full 50 million.The film ends perfectly, I think. He sits alone in his palatial room on a regal chair, with his cigar. His wife is divorcing him, his daughters have been distanced by his coldness and empty claim of love. The "Calypso" message arrives. He sits. My understanding of his character, as it has been portrayed so consistently, is that he thinks to himself something like "that is no concern of mine."

R. Ignacio Litardo Stanislas is a man born with luck: rich in a rich country, beautiful wife and family, CEO of his family company, chauffeur, lives in a Parisian Palace. And yet, just one false step and he ends up kidnapped, humiliated, one finger cut off, beaten, starved, and most important, devoid of all power. We learn he led a double life, lovers from different countries, an apartment he used frequently, hunting trips and... game debts. Big debts. Does the kidnapping owe to his debtors? Or is it somebody from his own circle, wanting his post? Was it a self-kidnapping, as a means to erase his debts? As hypothesis multiply, doubts flourish in his own company and family circle, and issues start to come up to the surface.Well filmed, the contrast between "civilized" rich man's life and the gritty and humiliating treatment of the kidnappers is what stroke me most of this film. How easy it is to slip from one world to the next. It happens in the best of families, in the first world too.My favourite character is S.'s politically incorrect mum, Marjorie (elegant Françoise Fabian), usually saying what everybody thinks. Maître Walser is also fine. Françoise and her grouchy daughters are correctly hateful. You may like red setters (his dog's breed) a bit more now :).Good ending.Fellow IMDb reviewer "JRlock" wrote it well: "is not easy to capture both the sympathy and contempt of the viewer in the same movie, but he did here". And Chris Knipp's insights, like how Stanislas' freedom may be illusory, how this may be a film about solitude, or what the French title sounds like, have to be read from his own bright review to be enjoyed.Not easy watching, as you probably know already, but enlightening.

Chris Knipp The Belgian-born Lucas Belvaux, who began his career by running away to Paris and becoming an actor, has over 45 TV and film acting credits and is in the cast most recently of Robert Guédiguian's Army of Crime. As a director he's best known for his "Trilogy," three films with interlocking stories and characters, each filmed in a different genre. Cavale/On the Run is a 'policier,' or thriller; 'Un couple épatant'/'A Terrific Couple' is a comedy; 'Après la vie'/'After Life' is a melodrama. For this now-famous project Belvaux won the Prix Louis-Delluc in 2003.'Rapt' is a thriller, and an elegant-looking and beautifully made one that is both breathtaking and thought-provoking. It stars a riveting Yvan Attal, a hot actor this year who also stars in another high-energy 2010 "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" film, Cédric Kahn's amour fou tale, 'Regrets.' Through the course of 'Rapt,' one is drawn into a closer and closer identification with Attal's character and his complex, disturbing, very modern fate.The English word 'rapt' of the title, used for this French-language film, carries with it a hint of shock. It's meant in its basic sense of transported, carried away. It sounds like "raped." It's more arresting and harsh than the French word for kidnapping, 'enlevé.' The subject is just that, the kidnapping of a rich and powerful corporate head so high up he deals directly with officials of the French government on a day-to-day basis. At first the movie promises to be a conventional thriller: rich guy held for ransom, bargaining, tension, threats -- and the diminutive, swarthy Attal doesn't seem totally convincing as Stanislas Graff, a mover and shaker of the French establishment. What's he running around about? The rapid sequence of opening scenes also fails to define fully who exactly Graff is, whether government or business. His being constantly called "Président" throughout may confuse us as American viewers. But it doesn't hurt the film too much for his identity to be somewhat generic.This is because once Graff is captured things become much more convincing, and (spoiler!) after he's released, things become interesting and surprising. 'Rapt' is another stunning example, like Guillaume Canet's 2006 star-studded version of the Harlen Coben novel 'Tell No One,' that the French now can do American thrillers better than Hollywood, giving a spin to them that's both classic and fresh. Belvaux's ingenious film succeeds very economically -- without money wasted on explosions or special effects -- both as an intense nail-biter and as a tale that reaches for the philosophical and heroic. He's very high up, very powerful, but he's also someone those closest to him hardly know. The kidnapping of Stnaslas Graff is seen as a primal trauma that alters his life and his family's, company's, perhaps his culture's equilibrium irrevocably. Nothing can be done to go back, and nothing can ever be the same in Graff's world again.Graff's chauffeur-driven car is stopped, he's carried away, and he's very rapidly hidden away, terrified, humiliated, hurt, and mutilated. A finger is sent off to prove the kidnappers really have him. The confinement goes through stages. At first he's continually masked and not allowed to look in the face of the (also masked) guardians, and he must hover in a tiny tent inside some vast abandoned prison complex or factory. Later he's moved elsewhere, fed properly, talked to pleasantly, allowed to move around in a cell, and his chief kidnapper, still masked, lets him look. Meanwhile frantic activity goes on in Paris. The ransom demanded is 50 million euros. His family can't access his money. His company agrees to advance a sum, no more then 20 million. Later it goes higher.The police enter the picture massively, but against the wishes of the company and Graff's attorney, an elegant black man, Maître Walser (Alex Descas of '35 Shots of Rum,' also in 'The Limits of Control'). The rest is a story of warring forces and shifting loyalties, with female family members (Anne Consigny, Françoise Fabian, Sarah Messens as loyal mother and reproachful wife and daughter) tested by revelations of Graff's secret life, his gambling debuts at poker and the casino, his mistresses and posh glass hideaway above Paris. All this is now published in the magazines and tabloids. It's even suggested by people in the company and the police that Graff could have contrived the kidnapping to settle his debts. His influence at the company is seriously dented, and during the two months of his confinement, the interim CEO gains power. When it's all over, Graff has only his red setter to love him and to love. And yet there is a rebirth. But it may be illusory.'Rapt' carries its story beyond the conventional climax into a kind of heroic struggle for identity and power, a drama of the essential loneliness of man and the dominance of image in the modern world. Some of the speeches in the last segment might come from a contemporary version of Corneille or Racine. Attal is remarkable, suffering, Christlike in confinement, also resembling the death mask of Marcel Proust; then reborn, fiery, but surrounded by confining police protectors and intimate betrayers of trust so his freedom seems anything but that and the real brutality may be in release, the real prisons wealth, power, and fame. But it's not that simple: Rapt isn't preachy or tendentious; it supplies you with a damn good time but leaves you pondering. It may be a better film than it seems, or even than its makers realized. In his famous "Trilogy" Belvaux played with genres. Here he uses a single genre to transcend genre. Like Cantet's Tell No One, this plays very well as a mainstream film, but is much more.'Rapt' opened in Paris November 18, 2009 to very good reviews; shown at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Walter Reade Theater and IFC Center, New York, March 2010.