(As in the movie, the purloined flesh was left in a baggage locker for pickup.) Initially identified as radical leftists (snatching the rich was all the vogue in some revolutionary circles), his kidnappers just wanted dough.Īs reports of Graff’s womanizing and gambling hit, perceptions - in his home, the boardroom, the media and perhaps the movie theater - shift. In truth, the story is drawn from the 1978 kidnapping of Baron Édouard-Jean Empain, a Belgian-French industrialist who, during his ordeal, unwillingly lost part of a finger.
In its outlines - a man of power humbled - the case (and Graff’s hauteur) evokes that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former chairman of the International Monetary Fund accused of sexually assaulting a New York hotel worker. He’s the sort of man who makes the society pages when he squires his wife around (Anne Consigny plays the designated weeper, Françoise) and the gossip columns when he doesn’t.Īfter Graff is kidnapped, another news cycle kicks in as reporters gather outside his mansion baying for news before turning to something, anything, else, when the information grows stale. As suggested by the film’s slamming start and by the luxury that surrounds and at times almost seems to encrust him like barnacles - gold trims his mansion and marble turns his office into a mausoleum - Graff is an archetypal vision of the industrialist as modern aristocrat. That transformation, along with the clash of truths and interests, is at the core of “Rapt,” which stars Yvan Attal as Stanislas Graff, the chairman of a corporation whose cosseted existence comes with a substantial family fortune and what turns out to be a heavy price. This frenetic activity soon jolts to a halt, though, when his chauffeured car is jacked and he’s snatched by armed kidnappers who turn him into a victim even as the outside world transforms him into the accused. You see one world in the gangbuster opening that, with a racing camera, follows a sleek, unidentified man as he hurtles through a day in a matter of moments, rushing out of his home, whooshing into an office, bolting from a meeting and all but flinging himself into the arms of one woman before embracing another. Worlds collide in “Rapt,” a solid yet fleet French thriller about a society kidnapping and its shockwaves.
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