Love Is Not Enough
by Chris Dashiell

At 78 years old, Claude Chabrol is still going strong, doing what he does best—sly psychological dramas with a touch of mystery and an eye on the deceptions of class. His latest is called A Girl Cut in Two—the title’s magic-act metaphor may not be clear until the end, but the symbolism of a young woman being an object of contention between two men is evident enough. What’s really at stake, though, is nothing less than the death of innocence.

A novelist named Charles Saint-Denis (played with uncanny assurance by François Berléand) is famous and successful, married to a woman he calls a “saint,” and apparently satisfied to live in relative seclusion at his country home. On a tour in Lyons to promote his new book, he encounters a beautiful young woman, a local TV weather girl named Gabrielle, played by Ludivine Sagnier. She also catches the eye of Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), the spoiled, reckless son of a rich family, who happens to bear a mysterious grudge against Saint-Denis.

Gabrielle ends up falling for the much older man, and her intense passion, emotional and sexual, runs up against his urbane sophistication. St. Denis is difficult to read—he seems smitten by the young woman, but on the other hand he’s unwilling to leave his wife. Gabrielle’s desire knows no caution, and her genuine feelings allow her to be debauched by the writer at a sort of exclusive private men’s club/brothel. Waiting in the wings is Paul, who wants to save her from the decadent clutches of the author, while seeming more than a bit like a crazed stalker himself.

Gabrielle is something of an anomaly in a modern setting—a lover in the old style, surrendering herself totally to passion. Although she seems unusually self-confident, she is also naïve in the ways of the upper-class world, and Sagnier embodies this central character with marvelous poise and conviction. Swirling around her are a host of witty, intelligent, and unhappy people, and much of the film’s pleasure derives from the ease and sense of command with which Chabrol depicts this social world of moneyed families and literati.

Paul’s self-righteous snob of a mother, played with wicked élan by Caroline Silhol, is a pointed contrast to Gabrielle’s careless sincerity. The eminent writer Charles, looking down on the world from his intellectual tower, is another kind of object lesson. The audience will instinctively take the point of view of Gabrielle, which is why the reality of the situation may dawn just as slowly on us as on her. What’s interesting is how Chabrol gets us to that point—with a good deal of satiric bite, but even more with a kind of emotional suspense, an inner tension between comforting illusion and heart-shattering truth.

The story (Chabrol wrote the script with his stepdaughter and long-time collaborator Cécile Maistre) is inspired by the 1906 Stanford White scandal, yet the film is perhaps uniquely French in its concerns—a study of the relationship between erotic love and the social order that seeks to confine it. A Girl Cut in Two is the kind of intelligent, vigorous work that only a master like Chabrol could have made.


©2008 Chris Dashiell
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