'A Girl Cut in Two' is precious, creepy

By Michael Sragow

September 26, 2008

The novelist-antihero of the French film A Girl Cut In Two is played with elegant ambiguity by Francois Berleand, but when he declares that his society is caught at the crossroads of puritanism and decadence, he's laying out the problem of the movie. Claude Chabrol has taken a famous American murder story -- the killing of architect Stanford White, filmed by Richard Fleischer in 1956 as The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing -- and turned it into an objet d'art that's precious in the good and bad senses of the word.

The title character is an unspoiled Lyon TV weathergirl (Ludivine Sagnier) so avid for experience that she happily meets all the sexual demands of Berleand's novelist, a local literary lion who is both genuine and perverse (and happily married). When she can't shake her enthrallment, she looks for relief in the precise worst place: the arms of a schizophrenic heir to a Lyon drug tycoon.

Chabrol does a swell job of suggesting a private world that fosters jadedness and corruption rather than liberation or delight. Then he pulls back. He's more interested in behavioral patterns then in passions. The result is a film too cold for melodrama and too restrained for tragedy. But it does have the distinction of being the creepiest in this year's slew of old writer/young lover movies.

In French with English subtitles. Unrated. Time 155 minutes.