L'innocenza del peccato

"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.

At this point in Claude Chabrol's career one might expect him to cut loose and do something just totally crazy and not to give a hoot about his consistent style as a director. A Girl Cut in Two, for better or worse, is still disciplined and carefully constructed and directed, and maybe because of this once in a while suffers from not wavering in its approach; it's kind of like That Almost Obscure Object of Desire. But within its set terms the film is enjoyable and even has a kind of biting underlying wit to the proceedings.

I would think this film might appeal more to the middle or lower class as opposed to upper class and wealthy as the former can perhaps relish in this tumultuous love life of this weather girl Gabrielle (very beautiful Ludivine Sagnier, kind of a prettier Chloe Sevigny) and the classic "turning the men's worlds upside down" formula. As for fans of Chabrol, and this goes without saying it's not a great film, it's a sign that, like Woody Allen, he isn't going anywhere and still has some ideas kicking around.

It's about the effect Gabrielle has on a man twice her age, novelist Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand in a quietly powerful and thoughtful performance), and a spoiled and possibly emotionally combustible guy more her age, Paul (Benoit Magimel, very good in that his performance is narrowed to being this creepy person). She really is head over heels for the older man, who sadly is also (happily) married to his wife of many years, while Paul does all but wave a sign saying "pick me, I'm free, pick me" (with the line "I get what I always want" crossed out save for when he's drunk). It's like a double Catch 22 situation, leading up to a marriage, a murder, and other occurrences. Chabrol presents all of this in what appears to be a straightforward style, which usually suits him best, and within this comes out the moral complexities.

This could be enough for a decent movie, if maybe a little slight in the mostly bourgeois atmosphere, but Chabrol heaps on some social commentary to boot: it's not just Paul but also Charles that put up a kind of front of complacency that is hard to crack for Gabrielle. It's slightly playful, mostly harsh, but always controlled satire, not of the laugh-out-loud kind but where one might chuckle or raise an eyebrow at a plot point or scene of specific acting. It's an interesting approach which isn't entirely effective but never makes it boring. A Girl Cut in Two is acted just as it should (Caroline Silhol particularly gives a deliciously icy performance as Paul's mother), and is written and directed with a knowledge of its audience. 7.5/10

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.

Accordind to the IMDb's listing, "La Fille coupée en deux" is the 69th Claude Chabrol's movie since 1958 and his first movie "Le beau Serge". 69 : with that number, Chabrol has managed to outnumber his old master : Alfred Hitchckock. And if all of his movies are not as good as Hitchcock's ones (none of them actually), I'm sure his last one would have amused Sir Alfred, for it's certainly one of his richest and intriguing movie since many years. I thing I've not been such intrigued by a Chabrol's since "L'enfer" in 1994 and its "No end" ending.

"La Fille coupée en deux" apparently deals with the same subject as "L'enfer" : love, and it's tragic consequences. But if "L'enfer" mostly dealt with madness and jealousy, "La fille..." approaches tragedy (but always in a cynical and almost funny way : Chabrol's universe is alway game-full) with the thematic of desire. It's the girl cut in half of the tittle that crystallizes this desire : Gabrielle Aurore Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier), a young TV-host, desires an older and decadent writer Charles Saint Denis (the great François Berléand) and is desired by a young and crazy aristocrat (Benoît Magimel, it's the first time to me that he's quite acceptable in a movie). Chabrol plays for a time with his characters ans his spectators, who don't exactly know where he wants to bring us. But the game is interesting enough to be played.

This movie looks a lot like Woody Allen's "Scoop", with Ludivide Sagner as a french Scarlet Johanson. Chabrol even quotes Woody Allen in the movie, and shares with him the same tragic but insouciant thriller tone. But it's really the similarity with another director that stroke me with this movie. It's the first time that a Chabrol's movie strangely sometimes looks like a Brisseau's. Chabrol uses here, as in Brisseau's "Choses Secrètes", symbolic feminine mythological figures in order to develop his thematics ( it's particularly striking in the dichotomously representation of Charles Saint Denis' two woman : his white and angel-like wife, and his dark and mysterious Capucine). But it's mostly in the desire's representation in the strange club where Saint Denis likes to go that the two directors share some common points. Of course, whereas Brisseau is more than explicit, Chabrol doesn't show anything, but the moral fable aspect of the movie, with a Hitchcock's influence in the way Chabrol "suspenses" the desire representation, makes this movie quiet near to Brisseau's universe.

Anyway, it's been a very long time since a Chabrol's movie didn't appear to me as rich, original and surprising as this one.

I'll be honest, I only watched The Girl Cut in Two because I think Ludivine Sagnier is a Class A hottie. So it's probably not a shock that I was underwhelmed by it.

It's a rather French movie about a woman (Sagnier) who is pursued by two men, a young and emotionally volatile rich man, and an older married writer. Both men are ultimately bad options, and the movie quickly changes from something of a charming romantic film to something much darker in tone. It could be called "a movie cut in two", if a person wanted to be clever (which I do). 

Anyway, neither half of the movie was particularly good, in my opinion. The narrative tended to wander, Sagnier's character seemed silly and unsympathetic with little explanation of why, and the other characters were almost universally unlikable or uninteresting. Combine all that with the odd (and not in a compelling way) ending, and The Girl Cut in Two becomes a movie that I probably wouldn't recommend.