Film Review for A Girl Cut in Two
A Girl Cut in Two Movie Trailer movie storyline. Although the Marquis de Sade earns a passing wink, with its cool surfaces, threatening heat and hapless female heroine, “A Girl Cut in Two” plays out more like a bold coda to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O.” It is, in truth, a rich, textured divertissement from Claude Chabrol, a sinister master of the art, who, after a series of vague if invariably entertaining cinematic sketches, has returned to elegant tight form with an erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires.
The drowsy-eyed Ludivine Sagnier plays Gabrielle Deneige, who, as befits her sunny smile and frigid last name (neige means snow in French), breezily delivers the weather on a regional Lyon news show. Flirty and flighty, she sashays around work and town with an incaution that soon attracts two prominent locals, Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand, dry and menacing), a distinguished novelist with louche tastes who is several decades her senior, and Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel, wonderfully absurd), the impetuous and babyish scion of a wealthy pharmaceutical family. With varying degrees of success and equally matched and monstrous egos, the two men push and pull at Gabrielle, having a go at a woman who, for much of the film, seems as pliant as a puppet, an obedient pet, a child.
Mr. Chabrol may have once enjoyed punishing his sexual female characters (it’s there in his first feature, “Le Beau Serge,” and titles that follow), but this early tendency has happily given way to more complex portraits. Appealing yet elusive, more question mark than answer, Gabrielle, like a lot of female characters, tends to be acted upon — her salacious boss and fretful mother do their share of pushing and pulling — rather than act on her own behalf. Even so, she is also more provocative than the pretty plaything she first suggests, despite the way she readily cedes to Charles and, somewhat more reluctantly, gives in to the more aggressive Paul. When she accompanies Charles into the film’s darkest shadows, she takes the lead, a smile edging her pout.
Written by Mr. Chabrol and his assistant director (and stepdaughter) Cécile Maistre, the screenplay was inspired by a true-life melodrama involving the 19th-century architect Stanford White (he designed the Washington Arch, among other New York landmarks), his mistress and her violently aggrieved millionaire husband.
But from its air of decadence to its prowling camera movements, this is a Claude Chabrol film from lurid start to surrealistic finish. Beginning with the film’s opening credits, saturated in red and revealingly accompanied by a blast from Puccini’s “Turandot” — one of those rare classics in which the soprano makes it out alive — Mr. Chabrol has you firmly by the throat. (“What flickers red and warm like a flame, but is not fire?,” a character asks in “Turandot.” Answer: “Blood.”)
Though it culminates with an open-and-shut murder, or so it seems, the mysteries of “A Girl Cut in Two” happily never resolve. Mr. Chabrol’s characters are always ripely conceived yet evasive, full of surprises and curious habits while remaining beyond easy psychological reach.
Even a late back story can’t explain Paul’s reckless eccentricities (among them, tossing objects at the camera, which consequently retreats like a supplicating servant). Much like Charles, who appears perverted by success — his publisher, a Goth temptress played by Mathilda May, looks like a dominatrix — Paul is a creature of his cloistered existence. Both men corrupt Gabrielle in their pathetic fashion, but it is the larger world, with its cruelties, pettiness and lack of tenderness, that almost does her in. The weather outside, she learns, is frightening.
A Girl Cut in Two (2008)
Directed by: Claude Chabrol
Starring: Ludivine Sagnier, Benoit Magimel, Francois Berleand, Mathilda May, Caroline Sihol, Marie Bunel, Valéria Cavalli, Etienne Chicot, Edouard Baer, Jean-Marie Winling
Screenplay by: Claude Chabrol, Cecil Maistre
Production Design by: Françoise Benoît-Fresco
Cinematography by: Eduardo Serra
Film Editing by: Monique Fardoulis
Costume Design by: Mic Cheminal
Makeup Department: Maya Benamer, Alexandre Laforest, Aurélie Rameau
Music by: Matthieu Chabrol
Distributed by IFC Films
Release Date: August 15, 2008
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