Cut In Two, Sagnier Contemplates Chabrol, America

At age 78, Claude Chabrol is still at it. The legendary French filmmaker—an original member of the 1950s New Wave film movement—has released yet another film, adding to his list of more than 60 over his lengthy career. But his work is not suffering for his age: La Fille Coupee en Deux, released in the US as A Girl Cut in Two, is a masterpiece of suspense, a drama that delves deep into relations between people and their perceptions of each other. A Girl Cut in Two transports a notorious scandal from the turn of the last century, the murder of celebrated architect Stanford White by his mistress’s husband, to modern-day France. The tale changes from sensationalized tabloid account to a more human-scale story, one that is perhaps even more comfortable in this new setting.

The film centers on the young Gabrielle Deneige (translated in the subtitles as Gabrielle Snow), a young and beautiful television weather girl played by Ludivine Sagnier. Ambitious but still naïve to her own power over men, Gabrielle becomes a player in a love triangle, torn between the affections of two men: the celebrated (and happily married) author Charles Saint-Denis (played by Francois Berleand) and the young, wealthy, and extremely unbalanced Paul Gaudens (Benoi Magimel). Gabrielle is torn not only between the men themselves but the worlds they represent.

Chabrol gives his actors complete freedom in shaping their characters, Sagnier told Spectator in a recent interview. “He doesn’t like to give away any details of the psychological background of the characters, of the situation,” she said. “It’s like you’re working with him, hunting a treasure. You have a map and you have to get the clues here and there in order to understand what it means, and you do the work on your own.”

Sagnier is a rare actress who is both beautiful (notoriously so—she spent much of 2003’s Swimming Pool in the nude) and talented. She has honed her own character nearly to perfection. She describes Gabrielle as being “driven by constant will of positivity and of success,” which eventually only adds to her naïveté. She sees Gabrielle as naïve and inexperienced, more interested in “doing good things” than using her sex appeal to promote her career.

It’s hard to imagine a heroine like Gabrielle, or an actress like Sagnier, in serious American film. Sagnier is a well-regarded, serious actress in France, despite the hyper-sexualized roles she has played. “It’s true that I have represented very sexual characters,” she said, “but always in very serious movies. Always in movies that were quality movies, so it was not like being the bombshell in Diehard.” In America, she says, “there are so many taboos that the only people who are highly sexualized are hysterical.” Then, she waxed poetic, adding, “America is a country of extremes. You have the most anorexic people, the most obese people, the more open-minded people, the more narrow people.” While compiling this list, Sagnier sounded surprisingly affectionate towards this country, where she says she would like to do more work. “That’s what makes your country so fascinating,” she said.

A reason for the extremes that exist within America, Sagnier posited, is “you have this cultural Puritanism that we [France] don’t have.” Though that element may not be as obvious in France, it still exists there. In an early scene in A Girl Cut in Two, the author Charles Saint-Denis wonders whether French society is headed towards Puritanism or decadence. It’s one of the two, he thinks. That Puritanism becomes evident later in the film when a sex scandal threatens to unravel the reputation of that well-known author.

In fact it is this very idea of dualism—Puritanism vs. decadence, old money vs. the intelligencia, reality vs. illusion—that guides the film: the two halves of the eponymous girl. This idea, along with the superb acting and the beautifully executed cinematography, propels A Girl Cut in Two, though in the end we have no clearer idea which of the two extremes will prevail.

It’s not likely that Claude Chabrol would give that answer away easily. “He doesn’t doubt,” Sagnier says of the director, “and also he doesn’t show his feeling at all, where other directors are much more fragile and show their vulnerability.” We can only hope that whatever vision silently drives Chabrol and his films will stay intact for a few years more, enough for him to engross and provoke us yet again.