‘La fille coupée en deux‘ (the title is faithfully translated into English as ‘A Girl Cut in Two‘) is the penultimate feature film by Claude Chabrol. Before seeing the film I was wondering why the French director chose this sensational title. I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence, and suspected it was an ironic allusion to the ‘slasher’ movies titles that had become popular in the late 1950s. I’m probably not wrong, but the title says a lot more. It actually summarizes the psychological situation of the main heroine, and at the end there is even a girl who seems to be cut in two (literally). Chabrol was in 2007, when ‘La fille coupée en deux‘ was made, one of the few survivors of the New Wave film directors. Among the secrets of the trade invented or promoted by them was the judicious and never random choice of movie titles.
The story is inspired by a real case that took place at the beginning of the 20th century in New York, but the action and characters are transported a hundred years later, to the Lyon of the years in which the film was made. The social milieu is Chabrol‘s favorite and the target of his criticism – that of the wealthy class combined with corrupt politicians and house lawyers. The exception is the beautiful and blonde Gabrielle, a weather forecaster at a local television station, a girl smart enough and attractive enough to be offered a quick career advancement. She comes from a modest family, the mother is ‘just’ the owner of a small bookstore, the place where the fateful meeting between Gabrielle, the writer Charles Saint-Denis (20-30 years older than her) and the rich and strange Paul Gaudens, the heir to an empire in the chemical industry, takes place. The two men are attracted to Gabrielle, they both declare their love for her, which immediately puts them at odds, or maybe it’s a continuation of an older enmity. The girl prefers the older man, which arouses the sick jealousy of the young rival. She’s fascinated by the writer’s personality, or maybe it’s the attraction to older men. He, however, accustomed to being surrounded and adored by beautiful women, although he declares his love for her, is not willing to leave his wife, and in addition involves the young woman in his decadent lifestyle. Desperate Gabrielle makes increasingly bad decisions that lead to tragedy.
For Ludivine Sagnier, the actress who plays the lead role, I think that Gabrielle from ‘La fille coupée en deux‘ is the role that marked the transition into acting maturity. She interprets it with sensitivity and inner turmoil, with drama and with dignity. The roles of the two toxic men who vie for the young woman’s attention and destroy her life, two rivals very different in age and character, but similar in their selfishness and perversity, are also played admirably by François Berléand and Benoît Magimel. The entire cast is superb and each of the supporting roles are also carefully and truthfully constructed. As it often happens in Claude Chabrol‘s films, the most extreme situations and the darkest motivations of the characters’ behavior are not presented explicitly but are left off-screen or are told indirectly. It’s one of the important lessons Chabrol learned from his idol, the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Only towards the end, when the metaphor from the title also materializes, do we begin to understand that we have actually witnessed – behind the sparkling scenes within the French bourgeois milieu – some kind of a horror film. Claude Chabrol pays homage to Hitchcock, but reminds us that he was also a contemporary of David Lynch.