La fille coupée en deux

Greetings again from the darkness. With splashes of dark humor, I mostly found the film depressing. There are few things more disheartening than a totally desperate woman longing to be loved by one jerk, let alone two.

Luckily, this desperate woman is played by the gorgeous Ludivine Sagnier (from the far superior Swimming Pool). She is a TV weathergirl and talk show host who falls completely for an old man novelist (played very well by Francois Berleand). When she is spurned by the old guy, totally annoying, rich boy stalker comes along to rescue her. Trust fund baby Paul is played creepily by Benoit Magimel, who steals most of his scenes.

Directed by French master Claude Chabrol, the film just never allowed me to connect with any of the players. They all seemed to hate themselves and have no respect for anyone else. Quite the party, eh? The performances are such that it is watchable though I would have appreciated a more detailed characterization throughout the script. One simple question ... why did she fall for the old man? Just a baffling development for me.

The Girl Cut in Two was one of the great Claude Chabrol's final films in an astonishing career that span 58 years before his death in 2010. The former Cahiers du Cinema journalist was famously a huge fan of the work of Alfred Hitchcock, writing about the Master of Suspense at length for the magazine before Chabrol's own work weaved together Hitchcock's sublime blend of melodrama and tension with Chabrol's own French New Wave (his debut Le Beau Serge is widely considered the first). This 2007 effort does much of the same, but the emphasis is more on the melodrama for the main bulk of the film and it lacks the New Wave edge of his early, greater works.

Pretty young weather-girl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) catches the eye of the rich and famous author Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand) when the latter is interviewed at the TV station she works for. Charles performs a book signing at Gabrielle's mother's book store, where he is confronted by the filthy-rich heir to a pharmaceutical company, Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), while Charles invites Gabrielle to accompany him to an auction. The clearly unhinged Paul also lusts after Gabrielle, and begins an aggressive pursuit of her while she is off falling in love with the arrogant and pretentious (and married) Charles.

Sagnier is particularly lovely as a character who may have come across as spoiled and selfish if not handled quite so delicately. There are fewer things quite as uncomfortable to watch than a nice girl caught up in a love triangle with two absolute arseholes, and Berleand and Magimel certainly bring a complexity, and even flashes of sympathy, to their loathsome man-children. Gabrielle is pulled back and forth between the two - the metaphor of the title also plays out almost literally in a slightly surreal final scene - and this goes on for quite a while. It gradually builds up to the inevitable and the film begins to feel more juicy, however by the time this happens there aren't quite enough minutes remaining to fully explore its full potential. Certainly engaging but one of the French auteurs lesser works.

"A Girl Cut In Two" is the kind of movie that requires a lot of patience from its audience (it moves slowly and runs long), without really rewarding them for it at the end. Listed by IMDb as a drama/thriller, it is basically a drama about a young weather girl (and later TV show host) caught in two parallel relationships with a middle-aged writer and a rich heir about her age, with the "thriller" part (such as it is) coming into play only in the last 20 minutes. One of the main problems with the film is that the viewer can see right away that neither of these relationships is going to work out - the older man is married and just looking for cheap thrills, the younger man acts borderline psychotic right from the start - and you wonder how the heroine, who seems fairly smart in most ways, can be so naive as to not see that these two men are unworthy of her time. Perhaps the two most likable characters - the heroine's uncle and the young man's little sister - have very little screen time. The film is very well-acted, especially by Ludivine Sagnier and Francois Berléand, but ultimately it is a minor work for someone of Claude Chabrol's great reputation. (**)

The premise of the movie, that two super-size ego men, one young and rich and the other old and famous, go after a young woman, who doesn't know what she is getting into, is interesting. Unfortunately, the woman's feelings for the two seem to develop at a fast food pace that undermines the credibility of the entire story. Some reviewers have argued that the central female character is more complex and nuanced than previous attempts by director Claude Chabrol. If so, I cannot imagine how misogynist his previous movies were. Still worth it, especially for the acting performance by François Berléand. If you want to pay attention to a sexy and attractive woman in the movie, though, forget about the main character, and focus on Capucine, played by Mathilda May.

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." Oscar Wilde

I'm cut in two myself: wanting A Girl Cut in Two to be a companion piece to Patrice Leconte's unforgettable Girl on the Bridge (1999) and yet realizing it is wrong to expect such a complement. French icon Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut is an amusing and agonizing romance between an older writer and a young TV weather girl, about 30 years in between their ages. The story of the lost young woman and her older carnival knife thrower in Girl on a Bridge has layers of emotion where Girl Split contains little depth but the same type of metaphors.

Girl Cut recycles the January-May love affair, similar to the recent Elegy about a young woman and an older professor. The immediate attraction between the two is not explored, just the girl's voluptuousness and his pot-belly, receding hair, and low energy level. But then I should not forget the ultimate aphrodisiac: intellectualism. The common denominator is the mind meld, enacted by an aging thinker/artist and a young open mind.

The figurative splitting is woven into the plot: A spoiled, rich young man, Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), falls for an indifferent Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), who has a yearning for the older writer Charles Saint-Denis (Francoise Berleand). The triangle illustrates the complex yearnings of an attractive young woman, whose mother (Marie Bunel) spies Gabrielle's need for the father figure as well as her own wish for her daughter to be financially comfortable. The warfare among the classes is typically Francaise.

As for Gabrielle, it is never clear where her love for the old man comes from, for she never seems to read his works, and their interaction before the first tryst is superficial. Perhaps she has a thing for big bellies and bald pates.