On DVD: "Rapt"

The director Lucas Belvaux is possibly still best known for his Trilogy, a 2003-04 triptych that approached the same narrative from a variety of angles and didn't, ultimately, add up to much more than a skilful screenwriter's exercise. Rapt is more substantial: a slow-burn, deliberate kidnap thriller that plays out like one of the poker games its protagonist is apt to blow his personal fortune in. Yvan Attal plays the unlucky victim Stanislas Graff, a businessman bundled into a van by masked men keen to retrieve a major gambling debt.

The snag is that Graff - whose very name has the ring of brusqueness about it - is not the type of guy you might be prepared to hand over a ransom for; he admits to partying with Flavio Briatore, for a start, which instantly marks him as at least a bit of a dick. There follows an unusually involved process of negotiation over boardroom tables and in fancy restaurants, and the gradual unlocking of all those doors Stanislas Graff had carefully compartmentalised behind: it's revealed he's not just been profligate with his cash, leaving behind less money than anyone first thought, but with his affections too, the revelation of his serial adulteries leaving his wife and family in the peculiar situation of paying for someone they might not immediately want back in their lives.

Rapt might be viewed as a French Ransom, except Belvaux is less interested in using the kidnap for macho thrills than as the startpoint for a study in social and industrial relations. (The director's previous UK release, 2006's The Right of the Weakest, was a heist movie involving disenfranchised steelworkers, so it's a recurring concern.) "Maybe it's the times we're living in," shrugs Graff's closest advisor, and it's true the film preys upon our growing suspicions our captains of industry might be irresponsible playboys doing whatever the hell they want, no matter what the cost to others; the punchline here is that the businessman probably has less to fear from his captors than he does from his colleagues in the boardroom.

Either way, the hero couldn't be any less indomitable. Attal's been making a habit of these unsympathetic types (cf: the recent Leaving); here - passed around between kidnappers, and dishevelling to the point his exteriors come to resemble Graff's sad and shabby soul - the actor gives a performance commendable for its complete absence of vanity, and the ensemble working behind him are no less strong: the increasingly impressive Anne Consigny as Graff's self-deluding wife, coming to display hidden reserves of toughness; Françoise Fabian, recently revived as Rohmer's Maud, and as needling as ever as the businessman's mother, the real powerhouse of this family; and Claire Denis regular Alex Descas as the clan lawyer and fixer - its Tom Hagen equivalent - striving to stay several steps ahead of the police.

Rapt sometimes threatens to get a little too involved, as though plotted upon a chalkboard, with large arrows and pieces of string to connect the characters; the introduction of the no-nonsense Lieutenant Grazziani (Richard Sammut) with 45 minutes to go looks like a conscious effort to raise the narrative stakes somewhat higher. Yet Belvaux is very good at setting out communities and networks, at dramatising how people link up - and how they might try (and inevitably, in the modern age, fail) to shut themselves off. In an age where most young Francophile directors appear very much in thrall to the New Wave's auteurist sensibility, here perhaps is the inheritor of the (somewhat unfashionable) Jean-Pierre Melville tradition: genre with some depth and a twist.

Rapt is available on DVD from Monday.