Quite a good share of Claude Chabrol's tasty cocktail of romance and jealousy, A Girl Cut in Two, has at peace by before you realise that, in essence, goose egg much of consequence has happened. This is not a bad thing, and is more a will to Chabrol's talent behind the tv camera that he's able to keep his film engaging well past the point that it should have any real right to be. It gives the film a certain drifting quality, even if nonpareil knows that something more momentous is waiting in the wings.
Chabrol, who likewise co-wrote the script with C�cile Maistre, based his story in some measuring rod upon the sensational case of famous architect Stanford White's dispatch at Madison Square Garden's rooftop field in 1906. A definitive "murder of the c" case, the White slay had a plethora of salacious details for titillation, a number of which Chabrol cannily appropriates for his possess scenario. Set in the present day in Lyon, A Girl Cut in Two seems at first gear like another portrait of an ennui-cloaked artiste, whose fame and fortune no longer excites him. Charles Saint-Denis (Fran�ois Berl�and, splendid in his understatement here just as he was in Tell No One) is an aging novelist of incomparable fame surviving the double-dyed life. He lives on a beautiful estate, is feted for his work almost nonstop, has a wife wHO doesn't appear to notice or care about his habitual flirt, and the money to do basically whatever he wants. Being a famous novelist on the prowl, it doesn't take tenacious for Saint-Denis to cypher in on one of Lyon's about attractive individual females, the quite young and innocently beautiful Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier).
While Deneige, who lives at home with her eminently reasonable and disapproving mother, is falling desperately in sexual love with the much senior Saint-Denis (who's something of an arrogant buffoon, in addition to being a first-degree manipulator of the impressionable young), she's likewise being chased by a man her own eld. Looking like a Gallic Jude Law who's been on a months-long booze-up, Paul Gaudens (Beno�t Magimel, marvelously dissolute) is the scion of a local pharmaceutical hazard, as blase as he is flush. A snakelike avatar of louche misbehavior, Gaudens is all pout and preen, lazing about in tightfitting velvet coats and lachrymation up the town in his bouncy sports cable car when he's not scheming how to make Deneige his.
In no particular hurriedness to propel his tarradiddle to its conclusion, Chabrol takes his time line drawing the attractions and manias in this eminently neat little love triangle, and provides stack of entertainment along the way. Sagnier's beauty is played to maximum effect (she looks here like a fresh-faced and younger Penelope Ann Miller), as is her oddly innocent inexperience. When Saint-Denis decides to prepare her in the darker mysteries of desire (a point at which the film skirts and narrowly avoids ludicrousness), she's emotively torn between her desire for love and an approving father figure, and left emotionally broken between the deuce. Having Gaudens (who's as used to getting what he wants as is Saint-Denis) leap impetuously into this fragile relationship has an poignantly bull-in-the-china-shop effect.
Once Chabrol starts trying to tie his story together, however, the briefly intoxicating mist of desire, jealousy, and rampant wealth dissipates quite chop-chop. Although this was to the highest degree likely the desired burden, blowing away the na�ve attitudes held by his characters and showing them the results of their actions, it doesn't needs make for a ordered or touching story. Although A Girl Cut in Two does come with an initially heady and alcoholic give up, that proves to be a fugitive impression. Once viewers ar done with Chabrol's presciently crafted only fleeting film, its personal effects are quite an easily tossed off; no worries roughly hangovers here.
Aka La Fille coup�e en deux, A Girl Cut in Half.
That'd be the top half.
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