Has the Dominique Strauss-Kahn situation stirred your appetite for scandal? Lucas Belvaux's solidly made thriller about a French industrialist whose dirty laundry is aired for all to see should satiate some of your tabloid cravings. The circumstances are very different, of course: Stanislas Graff (Attal) has his fair share of paramours, as well as an extravagant gambling addiction, but his indiscretions are tolerated by those around him until he is abducted by a team of professional kidnappers. Suddenly, this jet-setting businessman is cuffed and blindfolded, confined to cramped quarters and forced to write ransom notes---one of which contains a hastily removed bodily appendage.
Belvaux's tension-building setup is stellar; the follow-through, less so. As Stanislas's ordeal drags on, Rapt is bogged down in procedural rigmarole: Scenes of cops plotting, the family worrying (it's wonderful to see Eric Rohmer muse Franoise Fabian as the protagonist's rich-bitch mother) and the paparazzi having a field day all blend monotonously together. Attal is terrific, pulling a Michael Fassbender--in-Hunger act to show the damaging physical and psychological effects the kidnapping has on a man plucked from his glass-house comfort zone. Yet Belvaux never takes the material---especially its karmic gotcha of a finale---to the multifaceted heights that a suspense-minded filmmaker like Hitchcock or Polanski surely would. The craft is strong, but the spirit is lacking.
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