Kid With a Bike, The
Synopsis
Screens as part of the 2011 New Orleans French Film Festival at the Prytania Theatre:
Wednesday, July 13, at 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, July 14, at noon
Nominated for four Cesar Awards (including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor), director Lucas Belvaux’s edge-of-your-seat thriller—inspired by the 1978 kidnapping of French industrialist Edouard-Jean Empain—features a career-defining performance by Yvan Attal (Munich, My Wife Is an Actress) as Stanislas Graff, a millionaire playboy who is abducted and held for ransom for 60 days. Brutally mutilated, humiliated by his captors, Graff patiently waits for his wife Françoise (Anne Consigny) and his associates to pay the ransom. Outside, his world collapses as the press reveals a double life he had successfully kept private: lavish parties, mistresses, gambling debts. Rapt is, in essence, two films: on the one hand, it’s a socio-political thriller of the kind made familiar by Costa-Gavras (Z) and, on the other, it’s a psychological study of a creature of power during and after his seizure by ransom-hunters, and the effects of the kidnap on those close and not so close to him.
