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"I don't realize a thing."
Such is the great tragedy of Claude Chabrol's sneaky moral thriller A Girl Cut in Two - its heroine isn't dumb, but neither is she canny enough to consider her position as a lamb to slaughter until the axe has already fallen. Much of the film's tone is light, almost frivolous, yet it's a necessary shell for a heart made of obsidian.
The light touch seems initially appropriate. The title female is fetching weather girl Gabrielle Deneige - literally "Gabrielle of snow" which rates as an appropriate moniker for multiple reasons. Gabrielle, played by Ludivine Sagnier in a performance that suggests both intelligence and naivete, occasionally at the same time, falls for famed author Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand) after meeting him at a book signing. Concurrently, she finds herself pursued by chemical-company heir Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel). So far, so good - we have a high-toned French comedy of manners, with a young lady doing what she can to ensnare the man she adores while staving off the suitor for whom she feels nothing more than polite tolerance.
Hold that thought, though: Charles is a married man who doesn't desire to shed his wife. Plus, Paul's persistent nature, his spoiled-rich-boy refusal to allow anything to be denied him, keeps him in orbit around Gabrielle even while she gets further involved (both emotionally and sexually) with Charles; this makes her an ill-fated fulcrum later on when Chabrol starts drawing ever more off the real-life turn-of-the-20th-century murder of New York architect Stanford White.
Thus it becomes gradually obvious that Chabrol, world cinema's foremost observer of upper-class moral rot, is yet again poking at the oozy secretions of decadent behavior. This time around, he's got a young, pretty outsider to dip into this decadence and see how scathed she comes out. The misleading jocularity of the film's first half feels cruel in retrospect; yet, Chabrol's sure hand and tight, even filmmaking skills keep this nastiness as a reflection of and not an endorsement of the sins visited upon Gabrielle so as to avoid any potential sour aftertaste. A Girl Cut in Two is really a film cut in two, with the dividing line coming in the form of a pointed fade to black as Gabrielle and Charles wander into the bowels of a house of ill repute.
The bisected nature of the story is keeping in line with several other contrasts in the course of the story, mostly involving the marked differences between Charles and Paul. Fiftyish Charles is cultured, well-spoken, even-tempered and unassuming; Berléland plays him with perfect dignity and just the slightest touch of affected ruefulness, like Phillipe Noiret minus the jowls. Paul, on the other hand, is an abusive, flashy, mentally unstable and emotionally mercurial man-boy, and Magimel acts up a storm obscuring whether his desire for Gabrielle may be genuine or may be the simple desire to take what someone else has. Over the course of the narrative, Charles is used as an example of classy Old World money while Paul is your average rude, brazenly thoughtless nouveau riche jackhole. The fundamental difference between the two is set up early via their first-date activities: Paul takes Gabrielle to a restaurant and attempts to impress her by ordering a 1961 Nuit-Saint-Georges while Charles takes her to an auction and wins a bid on a rare edition of a book, thus giving her a gift that implicitly states a respect for her intelligence. The message seems to be that it's not having money, it's knowing what to do with it.
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But therein lies the irony of it all - it really IS about having money. Just as the first half of A Girl Cut in Two is in no way indicative of where it ends up, so is the dichotomy between Charles and Paul eventually revealed to be a false one. Chabrol makes plain their differences as a smokescreen so we're not distracted by the fact that Charles's intentions are no more benevolent than Paul's. Charles, at heart, is one perverse dude ("I still enjoy the fleshy pleasures," he says), but he's long since learned to hide it under a facade of intellectualism and a solid reputation. As such, he can be embarrassingly open about his aims without having them questioned: The book he wins for Gabrielle is a work of erotic fiction. In another blackly ironic flourish, it's a first edition of Pierre Louys's The Woman and the Puppet, which details a two-man/one-woman love triangle that has the exact opposite power dynamic than this one, and Gabrielle follows his erotic perversions wherever they may go, never realizing that the puppet is her. Her lack of status makes her a plaything for the unscrupulous upper class.
It's a matter of up or down, and Gabrielle's existence on the downward slope makes her no more than an object, yet Chabrol takes the time to show her fighting against such labels. It's made clear that her blonde, willowy beauty and less-than-taxing job give others the perception that she's walking sex - her boss refers to her as "my pet," for instance - but Sagnier digs deep and portrays Gabrielle as a woman who wants to be taken seriously, knowing that her looks make it an uphill struggle. But when life's deck is suddenly stacked against you, it can be tough; she makes the mistake of falling for the wrong guy, the kind of mistake a lot of women make, and she made an unfortunate decision in the wake of that guy leaving her, but a lot of women don't have that used against them in a court of law. The final metaphor, where Gabrielle gives the title a more literal meaning, is a bit too on the nose, yet it also ties into how she got there. She was paying attention to what she thought was important (emotion), never realizing that the real business was sneaking up to pull out the rug from under her (class war). How sad.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)