As seen at the 2008 Los Angeles Film
Festival:
With A
Girl Cut in Two, veteran French director Claude Chabrol has
fashioned a genuinely engrossing semi-thriller/black comedy
that, while self-indulgent at times, proves compulsively
watchable. And no matter how farfetched the movie’s plot may
become, Chabrol always keeps things feeling authentic – a solid
feat.
But A Girl
Cut in Two isn’t the picture that it is because of Chabrol,
ironic as it may seem given the filmmaker’s status as one of the
pioneers of the French New Wave and its accompanying auteur
theory. Instead, the movie marks radiant actress Ludivine
Sagnier’s time to shine. As stunning to look at in every frame
as her performance is nuanced and engrossing, Sagnier owns A
Girl Cut in Two in the role of the protagonist. Her
performance fulfills everything that that of a Chabrol
leading-lady should: Sagnier is vulnerable and erotic, but also
intelligent and darkly funny.
Sagnier plays
Gabrielle Deneige, a local weathergirl who finds herself in two
wild relationships. (I wish I could come up with a better
adjective to describe these, but I can’t – part of the point of
the movie is to make Gabrielle’s persona obscured.) She becomes
transfixed by popular fifty-plus-year-old author Charles
Saint-Denis (François Berléand) when he appears on TV, only to
later find herself convinced that she would like to pursue a
relationship with him when she formally meets him at a
book-signing. He’s already married, but has long lost sexual
affinity with his wife despite still deeply caring for her. As
Gabrielle and Charles begin to engage in romance or something
like it, Gabrielle also dabbles in marriage with Paul Gaudens
(Benoit Magimel), a rich young heir to a pharmaceutical fortune
who she also meets at the signing. Initially unbeknownst to
Gabrielle, Paul and François share rather nasty feelings for
each other—and Paul develops especially-strong malice towards
François as Gabrielle becomes progressively enraptured in the
older man—creating, as the blood-red-tinted opening shots of the
film would reflect, a recipe for disaster.
Reading back
over that synopsis, I realize how glib and unlike the film it
really sounds. But the truth of the matter is: to confine A
Girl Cut in Two into a mere mold of words is unfair. This
isn’t so much a work of plot as it is a piece of expressionism
provided the convenience of a plot – not unlike the early films
Chabrol made in the 1960s and ‘70s. The way that the movie
juggles tone and emotion and abstraction is genuinely masterful,
much thanks to Chabrol no doubt. But again I return to the work
of Sagnier, who is every bit as responsible for the
aforementioned seamless juggling as her director is. Just like
the film, she captures the essences of both lofty melodrama and
gritty naturalism all in one package. The results are stirring.
But there’s
also a point at which my praise for the film must come to an
end. A Girl Cut in Two is, no doubt, much too long for
its own good. Running for 115 minutes, Chabrol’s work ultimately
tends to exhaust all emotional-angles when it comes to its
supporting characters—Sagnier could never tire in the lead role,
of course—and as a result it tends to wrap itself up into too
complete a package. As I left the film, I felt that the third
act was not rough enough around the edges, mostly because it
went on for too long. Chabrol, in essence, had ruined a lot of
the fun mystery associated with his supporting characters by
allowing them to stay on the screen for too long. There are two
moments—one following a murder and one following a magic trick
that explains the film’s title—in which the movie could’ve ended
with the aforementioned sense of mystery intact, rife with
unspoken emotional complexities. The current conclusion, while
logically conceived, isn’t nearly as intriguing as it should’ve
been.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
Review Published on: 6.25.2008
Screened on: 6.20.2008 at the
Majestic Crest Theatre in Westwood, CA.
