The Girl Cut in Two (Chabrol, 2007): Cine Lumiere, 1.55pm
This screening, which will be introduced by the film’s scriptwriter, Cécile Maistre-Chabrol is part of the Claude Chabrol season at the Cine Lumiere. The movie also screens on January 28th. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review:
‘French society may be drifting towards Puritanism or decadence,’ says
deciduous, sixtysomething, Goncourt-winning author Charles Saint-Denis
(a marvellously offhand François Berléand) in a mock-channel TV
interview in this nonchalantly acidic, upper-class-baiting delight by
approaching-nonagenarian director Claude Chabrol. Charles is clearly a
fully paid-up member of the decadent party: holed up in splendid
isolation in his modernist manse in the Lyon countryside, the old
married roué, gourmand, aphorist and erotomane is dubbed affectionately
‘the Marquis de Sade’ by his well-preserved publisher Capucine (Mathilda
May). He’s moved to join the despised Parisian ‘media circus’ having smelled fresh blood in Ludivine Sagnier’s
honest-hearted, less socially favoured weather girl, who he subjects to
a series of ‘free-love’ humiliations and abasements in his upmarket
brothel. Meanwhile, the unfortunate woman is assailed, in the equally
threatening second half of a destructive pincer-movement, by the manic
attentions of idle, arrogant, unstable, fatherless – and puritan –
millionaire Paul (Benoít Magimel) intent on marriage and possession. An
immaculate script, written with his long-term collaborator Cécile
Maistre, reinvents the celebrated 1906 White murder case as a barbed
anti-French-establishment anti-fairy tale (Sagnier’s weather girl is
named Deneige – ‘snow’). Beautifully lit and crisply shot by Eduardo
Serra, and directed with a confidence and seeming ease that stems from
(and quotes) some 60 years of post-New Wave cinematic mastery, Chabrol’s
latest comedy of manners is a minor stylistic and tonal triumph. Eschewing
explicit moral condemnation in favour of a scabrous Buñuelian cool,
humanised by a marvellously affecting central performance by Sagnier,
and surrounded intriguingly by satellite performances which play riskily
and amusingly with the edges of self-parody, this is one of Chabrol’s
most elegant, acerbic and heartfelt entertainments in years.
Wally Hammond
Here (and above) is the trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment