Girl Cut in Two (La Fille coupee en deux)
When exactly should we stop thinking of Ludivine Sagnier as a girl? For one thing, she's almost 30. For another, she carries her curves unlike any girl I know. But I see where Claude Chabrol is coming from with "A Girl Cut in Two." If you're a 78-year-old man, as Chabrol is, or a gentleman in his 50s, as the ritzy protagonist of this luxuriant sex opera is, every nubile creature who comes your way is a kind of girl. And Sagnier is eager at first to indulge the reduction, then reward it.
Sashaying through this film in a state of what can only be called maximum pertness, she plays a TV weathergirl comically named Gabrielle Deneige (or Gabrielle Snow), caught between two lusty adversaries: a middle-aged best-selling novelist, Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), and Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), a bitchy, lunatic aristocrat more her age.
Chabrol generously pops in and out of the goings-on of these three. Charles is preparing for the release of another book and flirts a little with Capucine (Mathilda May), his knockout publisher. But he adores his wife (Valeria Cavalli). He's a noted quote-aholic. He hates TV. He only writes longhand. He's a cliché of the modern French writer. But throw a cute TV weathergirl in his path and all bets are off. Gabrielle's mother (Marie Bunel) works at a bookstore where Charles is signing copies.
Eventually, Paul shows up at the store, pitches woo to Gabrielle, then saunters toward the author and pitches insults. "I find your tone paternalistic," "You talk like a book," that sort of thing. Few men can put obnoxiousness and sexiness in such a simpering package, but Magimel is an expert. He wears a lot of pinstripes and velvet and overly complicated dress shirts. This is a man after Anne Rice's heart.
After Gabrielle playfully rebuffs him, Paul makes it his mission to have her. He tells her he's rich. She tells him to stop, lest he think she'll want him for his money. He stalks her a little. She relents, and before long she's on a seesaw between Paul and Charles, at no expense to her serenity. But no man is ever satisfied with half a woman.
You want to know where Chabrol is taking all of this. It's intriguing. To be honest, though, there is less to it all than meets the eye.
Chabrol has always been more interested in sensibility than sense, in discourse on fashion and form than in the narrative possibilities of function, and on the rich hypocrisies of the wealthy. And so, there's some wonderful banter between the sexes ("You tease." "You father of three."), a sequence between Charles and his buddies - aging, horny, well-off white guys - lamenting the audacity of these kids today, and a well-deployed literary analogy or two.
"Girl Cut in Two" is as much a generation power play as it is a sex flick. Gabrielle goes from weathergirl to talk-show host ("Icing on the Cake" is the show's name), and she's quite good at reciting quotations, but right down to her last scene, she appears to have no thoughts of her own. That is, of course, what a man like Charles loves in a woman like her - he always thinks he has the intellectual and psychological upper hand. He's a father figure, and Gabrielle enjoys her role as the pupil-daughter. With Paul, the appeal to Gabrielle is less apparent. Maybe she likes the threat of being eaten alive.
Nonetheless, Chabrol backs his way into secrets beneath Paul's family tree, from which a lot of bloodless vampires hang upside down. Caroline Sihol plays the matriarch, and, trust me, she only looks like a music-box ballerina. The dame's a piece of work. Chabrol, who wrote the film with Cécile Maistre, has fun with these characters and with a lot of the splendid throwaway details in the picture. But he also brings his wisdom to bear on some the movie's absurdities without committing it to mustiness.
At some point, Woody Allen's name comes up in jest on Gabrielle's show, and you're happily reminded that Chabrol and Allen, who's a few years Chabrol's junior, are having fun with sensuality in their senior years. Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" suffers from the stodgy perceptions that Chabrol mostly avoids. But both directors are on decent late-career runs. Chabrol, for his part, makes his look so easy, combining the diabolic, the comic, and melodramatic. "A Girl Cut in Two" ends with an implausible chuck of magic. I rolled my eyes. Then I laughed.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/ae/movienation.
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