Movie Review: "A Girl Cut in Two"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

When the best scene in a movie involves a beautiful young woman looking up worshipfully at her much older lover while crawling towards him on her hands and knees with a peacock's tail attached to her ass, you're either watching a very strange movie or a work of genius. A Girl Cut in Two, the latest from French director Claude Chabrol, isn't a work of genius, but it is the second movie in a week to ride in with the news that hot young babes are putty in the hands of sixtyish grizzled-looking dudes with literary pedigrees. Like Elegy, A Girl Cut in Two has its own literary pedigree: it's an updated take on the Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit-Harry K. Thaw triangle that blazed across the tabloids in the 1920s and got a second life when E. L. Doctorow used it as the cornerstone of his 1975 novel Ragtime. Here, the stand-in for White is a distinguished, graying novelist, Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand), who is devotedly married but just can't seem to leave those young girls alone. (His agent, who packs a bathing suit when she comes to visit him and his wife in their big house in the country, where she practically camps out on his veranda, is played by the still-stunning Mathilda May, who some of us vulgar Americans will always remember best for her non-speaking, buck naked performance in the 1985 vampires-from-space movie Lifeforce.)

Charles's latest conquest is Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a fresh-faced blonde who delivers the weather reports on the TV news, where she's probably the best thing that's ever happened to the phrase "approaching gulf streams." When Charles spots her at his book signing, his eyes seem to pop out on springs, but in a tasteful and refined way, what with him being French and all. He soon secrets her away to his love nest in the city and then, overcome with emotion after she pulls that business with the peacock's tail ("You don't feel humiliated?" "Not even ridiculous."), he takes her to his special club, where classy people with subterranean sex drives get together to do things too shocking for Chabrol to do anything but hint at. He's said that the scenes at the club, where the actors kick back and trade knowing looks and the camera cuts away just when it looks as if we're going to get to see what they're all so smug about, "reflect my desire to explore the theme of perversion without ever showing it." I know that I'm not the one who's been making movies for fifty years, but I can't shake this feeling that giving your characters all kinds of interesting perversions and then not showing them amounts to failing to utilize one of the obvious advantages of making a movie about them in the first place.

I never believed a minute of A Girl Cut in Two, but it does have more of a sustained grip than Chabrol's recent movies, thanks in no small part to Sagnier's surprisingly vulnerable cupcake. Things take a turn for the goofy when the third side of this triangle heaves into sight: the spoiled rich rotter Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), who professes love for Gabrielle while seething with hatred for Charles. (He blames him for having somehow inflicted shame on his family, but the exact details are either never made clear or were spelled out in subtitles that flashed on the screen while I was checking to make sure that my wristwatch still lights up when I press that little button on the side.) With his psychedelic Thurston Howell III wardrobe and his gelled blonde hair with a fistful of forelock strategically draped over one eye, Magimel looks like a French Owen Wilson fronting an '80s "new romantic" cover band, but the actual dialogue he has to speak has nothing on Spandau Ballet. A Girl Cut in Two begins coughing up blood as soon as it begins devoting whole scenes to his aristocratic crumb-bum family, presided over by a vicious snob of a mother (Caroline Silhol, who played Dietrich in last year's Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose) who suggests an albino Morticia Addams. The last half hour or so, which wraps up with an ending that tops Chinatown in going out of it way to give literal meaning to a metaphorical title, dumps the confusion and chaos of adulterous passion in favor of one more demonstration that the cultured mask of the bourgeoisie masks a nest of serpents and is utterly disposable, though I did like the moment when a mercenary lawyer has a polite conversation with Mother Gaudens, exits the mansion, and as he heads for his car, goes, "Brrrrrrr!" The movie can best be appreciated as a one-hour-fifty-minute trailer for whatever Ludivine Sagnier does next. Whatever that is--Bond girl, female lead to Adam Sandler, Celebrity Detox Center: Paris Edition--I'm there.

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Peter Sellers, THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU (1980)

Peter Sellers (arguably) got away with heavy lids and mangled diction in his portrayal of the Charlie Chan-esque detective Sidney Wang in Neil Simon’s 1976 murder mystery spoof Murder By Death partly because the performance matched the film’s smart, silly, good-natured tone: Wang was likeable and sophisticated rather than the butt of, y’know, a bunch of sophomoric “wang” jokes, and what racial humor there was tended to satirize Hollywood’s portrayal of Asians more than making fun of actual Asians (“Moose on wall talk!” Wang says at one point, prompting the exasperated response, “THE moose! THE moose! Say your goddamned articles!”). Unfortunately, Sellers’ portrayal of Sax Rohmer’s controversial master criminal Fu Manchu a few years later was nowhere near as smart or successful, featuring brain-dead groaners like the following lyrics to Manchu’s climactic glam rock number (don’t ask): “The cops they tell you I ain’t nice, the Fu knows how to fry the rice.” Making Sellers’ depressingly bad final performance even more ignominious, though, is the fact that, without Fu Manchu, the legendary comedian’s last film would have been the far more fitting career zenith, Being There. (Although, either way, the actor’s reputation still would have suffered the final ignominy of 2004’s bizarrely overpraised HBO hatchet job The Life and Death of Peter Sellers).

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in THE CANNONBALL RUN II (1984)

Neither Frank Sinatra nor Dean Martin was primarily known for his film work, but both made their mark. Sinatra won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity, and Dino won accolades for his role in Rio Bravo. Their Rat Pack movies like Ocean's 11 and Robin and the Seven Hoods were popular successes if not particularly memorable films, but the quasi-Rat Pack flick Some Came Running represents the high-water mark for both ring-a-ding-dingers as actors. If it had ended there, no complaints. Sadly, Burt Reynolds succeeded Frank and Dean as ringleader of the next generation of Rat Packers, and coerced both (along with cohort Sammy Davis, Jr.) into The Cannonball Run II, perhaps the laziest big screen version of Hollywood Squares ever conceived. How lazy? The actual cross-country race was animated by Ralph Bakshi, while Sinatra's scene with Reynolds was clearly shot on two different continents in two different decades. As for Martin's "I'm not really drunk, I'm just pretending to be drunk" performance, let us not even speculate. Both made appearances on TV subsequent to Cannonball II, but cameos on Magnum PI did nothing to rectify this sad cinematic end.

Veronica Lake in FLESH FEAST (1970)

Never a great actress but one of the indelible beauties of '40s Hollywood, Veronica Lake -- she of the blonde peek-a-boo hairdo and world-weary kewpie doll face -- vanished into tabloid infamy and then total obscurity after her peak of wartime fame but managed a small, brief comeback in the late 1960s when nobody was looking. The 1966 Canadian film Footsteps in the Snow was her first movie in fifteen years, and one year later she starred in the mega-low budget horror film Flesh Feast, which wasn't released until 1970, three years before her death. (Presumably it took the producers that long to collect enough change digging under the couch cushions of friends and family members before they had enough saved up to get the film developed.) Lake, her distinctive looks now a fond memory and her acting chops still at the beginners' stage, plays a mad scientist who has developed a youth-restoring technique that involves the application of flesh-eating maggots. The members of the local chapter of the Unrepentant Old Nazis Party employ her to help them regenerate der Fuhrer, little knowing that Dr. Lake lost her family to the Nazis and she is actually looking to have Hitler strapped to her surgical table so that she can give him a good talking-to. The climactic face-off between these two raises the question of whose shame is greater: the once iconic Hollywood star who has sunk to the level of flinging maggots in the face of an actor pretending to be Hitler, or an actor whose career reached its high point when he got maggots flung in his face by a Hollywood has-been?

James Cagney in TERRIBLE JOE MORAN (1984)

James Cagney had been retired from acting for twenty years when he agreed to join the large, distinguished cast of 1981's Ragtime. As New York Police Commissioner Waldo, Cagney looked stumplike and was largely immobile, but he also had the old fire in his eyes to set off his wry half-smile and dandy period mustache, and managed to bark out his lines with gratifying professional force. Plans were made to take advantage of Cagney's new willingness to perform by starring him in a TV movie in which he would play an aging New York boxer. A script was custom-tailored to the old star, clips of the young Cagney (taken from boxing pictures he had made decades earlier) were interwoven to create some nostalgic poignance, and an ace supporting cast (counting solid pro Art Carney and up-and-comers Ellen Barkin and Peter Gallagher, if not local cameo hog Edward I. Koch) were brought in, seduced with the promise of working with a legend. But by the time the film went into production, Cagney's health had declined, to such a degree that he looked miserably pained and unhappy even for a man in a wheelchair. In fact, Cagney was in such bad shape that he couldn't always deliver his lines audibly, so someone had the bright idea of bringing in night club impressionist Rich Little to dub his lines for him. The upshot is that Cagney's "final role" amounts to footage of a dying man being wheeled around the set while listening to someone do his best Jimmy Cagney imitation. Cagney's old co-star Pat O'Brien, who also appeared in Ragtime, reportedly urged the legend to return to acting by telling him, "Do it, Cagney. It's medicine." But Terrible Joe Moran makes you wonder if sometimes the cure isn't worse than the disease.

Click here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab : ragtime

Movie Review: "A Girl Cut in Two"

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part Two)