La fille coupée en deux
Claude Chabrol (2007)
Chabrol’s track record had me expecting a quasi-thriller in which the interest and suspense are generated as much by character and relationships as by incident and situations. After half an hour it was clear there wasn’t any psychological depth to the material. The realisation was both deflating and relaxing but I thought I could at least look forward to entertaining, surprising twists and turns in the plot. There weren’t any of those either. Chabrol’s remarkably longevity as a filmmaker is matched by his productivity[1]: I hope this is one of his weakest efforts because (I think) it’s only the fourth film of his that I’ve seen.
The characters are mostly rich and/or successful: The Girl Cut in Two is essentially the story of a love triangle involving: Gabrielle Deneige, a TV weather girl (the punning surname seems pointless – she’s neither pure nor chilly); Charles Saint-Denis, an elderly, famous writer and philandering egotist – with whom Gabrielle falls in love; and Paul Gaudens, the scion of a wealthy Parisian family (owners of a pharmaceutical company), who’s mad about Gabrielle. They’re all too self-serving to be sympathetic and most of the minor characters are also dislikeable – Paul’s mother and his sisters, Charles’ calculating friend Capucine. But some or all of them might still have been amusing monsters. Chabrol (who also wrote the screenplay, with Cécile Maistre) commits the error of making them uninteresting too. It’s a quality they share with the one-note ‘nice’ people in the story – Charles’s lusciously tolerant wife, Gabrielle’s loving, concerned mother and benignly eccentric uncle. (Stéphane Debac, as Paul’s minder, is an exception in this respect: he suggests something more going on inside the character.)
Ludivine Sagnier gives Gabrielle a terrific professional radiance – you can understand why her bosses like her enough to promote her from weather forecasts to fronting a primetime chat show. As soon as Gabrielle is off camera, a light goes out but Sagnier still holds the screen completely. Within the (considerable) limits of the role, it’s a very good performance. Francois Bérleand (the headmaster in Les choristes) conveys Charles’ selfish arrogance with deadly but charmless accuracy; it’s only the occasional moments when the character’s face is transfigured by thoughts of his mortality that are involving. There are times when Benoît Magimel telegraphs Paul’s instability but he has a raw neediness that registers strongly. The two mothers in the story are as obviously played – by Marie Bunel (Mme Deneige) and Caroline Sihol (Mme Gaudens) – as they are written. There’s very little surprising either in what we see from Mathilda May (Capucine), Clémence Bretécher and Charley Fouquet (Paul’s sisters), Etienne Chicot (Gabrielle’s uncle) – or the actors playing the weakly satirised personnel of the TV station and the social worlds of the principals.
At one point, I wondered if Chabrol wanted to say something serious about the various ways in which men abuse women. Between them, Charles and Paul mete out to their wives and sexual partners physical humiliation, emotional cruelty and the threat of violence. But there’s no weight to this: the women we see are all educated, successful and physically equipped to make their own choices. And I didn’t believe that either Charles or Paul, given who they are, would keep coming back to Gabrielle for more: they do so because the plot requires it of them. The explanation of the traumatic event in Paul’s infancy which accounts for his and his mother’s personalities and relationship is as pat and phony as these kinds of revelation tend to be (the mother actually says, ‘From that point on, everything changed’, as if to underline this). The concluding sequence – when Gabrielle’s mistreatment is complete, her uncle is revealed to be a performing magician and she joins him onstage for him to do the trick which supplies the title – seems to come out of a different kind of film entirely. It gives a bit of spurious, garish symbolism to the proceedings – and may also explain the comedy / black comedy labelling of the picture on Wikipedia. IMDB does the same but describes it as a ‘drama / thriller’ too – evidently as unclear as I am about what Chabrol is trying to do.
31 May 2009
[1] See Les bonnes femmes.
