7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Chabrol's latest...all about sex, possession, ego...and satisfyingly pleasant and unpleasant retribution, July 4, 2009
This review is from: A Girl Cut in Two (DVD)
Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier) is blonde, friendly, smart but not shrewd or sophisticated. She's a weather presenter on a local television station. Her mother manages a bookstore. Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand) is a famous man of letters, winner of the Prix Goncourt. He's three decades her senior, wealthy, charming, aging and a rake. His wife loves him. Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel) is spoiled, arrogant, the young heir to the Gaudens chemical millions and seems to need a keeper to smooth over the trouble he causes for others and himself. His father is dead. His mother is elegant and icy. Both men become fixated on Gabrielle. Saint-Dennis, because she gives him youth and sex, because she is a malleable bit of female clay he can instruct in the worldly ways of sexual dissolution. Gaudens, because she doesn't fall over for him, yet treats him as the attractive man he thinks himself to be. Both men detest each other. Both would be fine catches for any ambitious young woman. Please note that elements of the plot are discussed..
Gabrielle falls in love with Saint-Denis, and is even willing to climb the carved, wooden, circular staircase with him in the elegant rake's club he takes her to, introducing her to his fellow aging, wealthy libertines. Charles wants her, has her, then doesn't want the entanglements, then wants her, then doesn't want the bother of leaving his wife, then wants her. Paul wants her, is furious with Charles for having her, wants her, wants her, wants her. And Gabrielle? The best description of her situation comes from Roger Ebert: "The three central characters are in an emotional fencing match, and Gabrielle lacks a mask." That she survives, and don't ask about the other two, makes a fine story that has not a trace of melodrama. We see what's going on, how the characters change, how Gabrielle changes, with all the usual impending unease that Claude Chabrol brings to his films. We know Gabrielle's situation cannot continue, but Chabrol keeps us guessing about his intentions and her fate. Towards the end, I was almost sure we were going to have one of those sad and ambiguous endings that usually drive me crazy. Then Chabrol wraps up his story about Gabrielle, the girl cut in two, with a final set-up that is amusing and satisfying, and a little surreal.
Chabrol has given us a fine movie. He's 78 now, and is a wonder. For those who may be fond of Ludivine Sagnier, three movies come to mind to show her range (not to mention her body):
8 Women, where at 23 she plays a pig-tailed tomboy about 15;
Swimming Pool, where a year later she plays a sex pot given to nude swims; and this one. For Francois Berleand, compare his self-assurance here with the high-ranking official Isabelle Huppert turns to sniveling impotence in Chabrol's cynical and satisfying
Comedy of Power.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
slow in the beginning..., July 14, 2011
This review is from: A Girl Cut in Two (DVD)
I felt the movie was just alright. It felt very slow to me. It took a while before anything remotely interesting happened. I was almost ready to give up on it. A young girl falls for an old married author. The author feeds her lines that he loves her and will leave his wife and things of this nature. The girl then starts hanging out with a young wealthy heir. She is eventually torn between the two men although it is most evident which one she prefers. I really enjoyed the ending. It didn't have a sterotypical ending. Actually, the ending is why I gave it 3 stars. I don't want to ruin it by giving it away and the ending isn't life changing or anything of that nature...I just liked it because it wasn't the typical happy ending riding off into the sunset on a white horse along the beach sort of thing.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The girl in the red velvet buzz saw, November 10, 2009
This review is from: A Girl Cut in Two (DVD)
Claude Chabrol was one of the most luminous of the lights that the Nouvelle Vague produced, gaining international attention with his psychological drama "Les Cousins" (1959), then later creating tense thrillers like "Le Boucher" (1970) and "Nada" (1974). His 2007 film "A Girl Cut in Two" ("La Fille Coupée en Deux") combines these styles to give us a strange story of emotional and sexual obssession. "One man's love is another man's lust," the tag line says, and the movie opens with images seen through a red filter and "In questa Reggia" on the soundtrack, indicating there's a dangerous story underway. It starts off safely enough, with a TV personality Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) having an affair with a famous author (François Berléand), even though he is married and old enough to be her father, and although he sees her strictly as a sex object, escorting her to an exclusive "club". At the same time she is courted by the wealthy scion of a chemical fortune (Benoit Magimel) who at first seems remarkably immature. It is only after she marries the heir that she realizes fully he is not so much immature as perilously deranged. Aware of her relationship with the author, he starts berating and nagging his wife, finally threatening her with a gun. If this plot is beginning to sound familiar it's because it is an almost blow-by-blow retelling of the White-Nesbit-Thaw affair which shocked New York in 1906. That scandal has been presented on the screen at least twice, in 1955's "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" and 1981's "Ragtime"; and it's not at all unlikely that Chabrol as a young man saw the former movie on its original release and was quite impressed, not only with the 22-year old Joan Collins playing the title role but with Richard Fleischer's smooth direction. At any rate he has made the scandal his own, setting the story not in early twentieth-century New York but in modern-day Lyon, and re-creating the characters to be similar but not exact replications of the original personalities. So Gabrielle (having been fired from her television celebrity) doesn't end up in a red velvet swing but being the "victim" in a carny show as the scantily-dressed girl sawn in two by her magician uncle. It's an ambiguous ending to a strong movie, but if one follows the train of thought here and assumes that Gabrielle's fate is going to be like that of Evelyn Nesbit (who, after a life of drug addiction and suicide attempts, died in a nursing home in 1967) it's a sad ending indeed.
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