Girl Cut In Two is spectacularly French. And that’s a good thing. It's entirely ridiculous and charming in equal measure. Claude Chabrol gives us Francois Berleand as a 50-something author of considerable repute and not inconsiderable kinky proclivities engaging in a gleefully permitted adulterous tryst with the gawkily attractive weather-girl Ludovine Sagnier. She likes quoting from books and saunters around her mum’s bookshop like some cultured coquettish dream. It’s not only Woody Allen that does this: Chabrol basically puts his ideal of cerebral beauty up there and has his aging artist pull her with ease as she initially bats off the awful attentions of a dreadful dandy, played by Benoit Magimel, who does a good job of channelling a young De Niro meets fey aristocratic waster. The kind of guy you might encounter in a nightmare after watching Brideshead Revisited whilst you were learning French.
However, our old scribe is the kind of chap that says impressively uppity things like, when confronted at a restaurant table by Magimel, ‘The impertinence of an inferiority complex’. The guy is pompous, but we loathe Magimel to such an extent that we immediately side with the gnomic writer. Which isn’t particularly easy. And is made harder still by his continually baffling toying with Sagnier, who clearly loves a bit of clever old arty guy but isn’t too fond of being bedded and then dropped like a bit of merde. And Magimel’s vulturous playboy waits in the wings, loaded and loathsome. He’s a prize berk and she’s clearly in need of a slightly more favourable love triangle, but we’re in a French film, so it’s never going to be run of the mill. You want to lead Savigner in the direction of the nearest scarecrow for a better deal, but that’s not just Chabrol’s drawing up of a couple of spoiled – in different ways – characters. Savigner is, let’s face it, adorable. It’s akin to watching a small child careening between two very different monsters.
Savigner loves the reclusive old writer who likes having her perform sex acts on his friends at an exclusive gentlemans club he frequents. He continually plays come-hither daddy-figure and then palms her away. The empty playboy loves her, or should I say covets her and can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t succumb, and she rebounds into the arms of the young disaster, eventually marrying him. She continues to yearn for Berleand and Magimel gets jealous – and the to-and-fro continues until a shooting clears the stage of both men and leaves Sagnier to contemplate what on earth she’s been doing for 90-odd minutes. In the meantime Savigner’s relatively new husband’s family uses her to get murdering hubby’s sentence curtailed before tossing her aside.
Sagnier muddies the directors intent, I’d say – which seems to draw some kind of conclusion about the contemporary power of women to shrug off dreadful men without becoming forever tarnished – by being the only likeable member of the cast. We wouldn’t care if she was done a hundred times by a reincarnated Hitler with a rusty iron swastika whilst dressed as Eva Braun: she has one of those inviolable screen presences that render the whole attempt a little futile.
However, our old scribe is the kind of chap that says impressively uppity things like, when confronted at a restaurant table by Magimel, ‘The impertinence of an inferiority complex’. The guy is pompous, but we loathe Magimel to such an extent that we immediately side with the gnomic writer. Which isn’t particularly easy. And is made harder still by his continually baffling toying with Sagnier, who clearly loves a bit of clever old arty guy but isn’t too fond of being bedded and then dropped like a bit of merde. And Magimel’s vulturous playboy waits in the wings, loaded and loathsome. He’s a prize berk and she’s clearly in need of a slightly more favourable love triangle, but we’re in a French film, so it’s never going to be run of the mill. You want to lead Savigner in the direction of the nearest scarecrow for a better deal, but that’s not just Chabrol’s drawing up of a couple of spoiled – in different ways – characters. Savigner is, let’s face it, adorable. It’s akin to watching a small child careening between two very different monsters.
Savigner loves the reclusive old writer who likes having her perform sex acts on his friends at an exclusive gentlemans club he frequents. He continually plays come-hither daddy-figure and then palms her away. The empty playboy loves her, or should I say covets her and can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t succumb, and she rebounds into the arms of the young disaster, eventually marrying him. She continues to yearn for Berleand and Magimel gets jealous – and the to-and-fro continues until a shooting clears the stage of both men and leaves Sagnier to contemplate what on earth she’s been doing for 90-odd minutes. In the meantime Savigner’s relatively new husband’s family uses her to get murdering hubby’s sentence curtailed before tossing her aside.
Sagnier muddies the directors intent, I’d say – which seems to draw some kind of conclusion about the contemporary power of women to shrug off dreadful men without becoming forever tarnished – by being the only likeable member of the cast. We wouldn’t care if she was done a hundred times by a reincarnated Hitler with a rusty iron swastika whilst dressed as Eva Braun: she has one of those inviolable screen presences that render the whole attempt a little futile.
Unless, of course, I have read the film wrong. I do, though, feel that a more complex, less likeable female lead might have posed one or two more interesting questions and might have lent the film a little more much-needed ambivalence. This is no ‘Girl Cut In Two’ – this is a girl manipulated by a couple of soulless men for a while but ultimately fairly okay thank you, better off well adrift of any of the characters Chabrol seems to delight in peopling his films with.
That all sounds rather critical: the film seems to strive for a certain feminist piquancy but instead seems like a bit of a confession. And either way, the film is supremely entertaining even when it doesn’t quite work as well as it thinks it does. Berleand wears a face that says, affably enough, ‘Yes, I am a pretty hollow, problematic guy that can’t get a hard-on without playing out all manner of elaborate fantasies. And I’m quite happy to mess people around for a bit of fun. So sue me!’ Benoit Magimel is a pantomime brat. Good support comes from the likes of Mathilda May. But Savigner not only steals the film, she saves it: a frothy, slight comedy of buffoonery, cold sexiness, moral decreptitude as sophistication and ruined people playing games. If France was that good, I'd move there.
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