Interview. Ludivine Sagnier.

A Girl Cut in Two is "a rich, textured divertissement from Claude Chabrol, a sinister master of the art, who, after a series of vague if invariably entertaining cinematic sketches, has returned to elegant tight form with an erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

That woman, Gabrielle Deneige, is played by Ludivine Sagnier, who, at 29, has already appeared in around three dozen features. James Van Maanen has a long, leisurely chat with her about working with Chabrol, Claude Miller, François Ozon and other directors; and about watching movies, French politics and whatever else strikes their fancy (they seem to have hit it off).

Updated through 8/18.

"As in his previous film, A Comedy of Power, Chabrol explores how a capable woman navigates a world that for all its advances remains stubbornly dominated by the whims of bourgeois male privilege. Its title notwithstanding, Girl doesn't cut as deeply in its class critique as A Comedy of Power, but it's the more satisfying film, thanks to Ludivine Sagnier," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine.

"Both before and after her performance as the bewitching blond cipher of Swimming Pool, it was clear that Sagnier is among the most striking young actresses in contemporary French cinema, and one who's nearly certain to make the jump across the Atlantic at some point," writes Andrew O'Hehir, introducing his interview for Salon.

"What makes Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two (2007) so trying is not that it's unsure of what it wants to be, but rather that it refuses to decide," finds Simon Abrams in the New York Press.

"The French director is in his comfort zone here, coolly flinging mud at the upper crust under the guise of a Hitchcockian thriller (nice Vertigo in-joke, Claude) that runs more smoothly than a well-tuned BMW," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "But even if you know that Chabrol views suspense films as just a mechanism for his benign misanthropy, you can't shake the sense that he's going through the motions."

"Chabrol has made a career out of savage class warfare, and A Girl Cut in Two fires off another bitter salvo," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Earlier: Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot and reviews from Venice and Toronto and New York.

Updates, 8/16: "'Tasteful' might be one way to describe Chabrol's style, but that doesn't account for the film's psychologically probing and ultimately unsettling effect," writes Kenji Fujishima at the House Next Door, where Fernando F Croce interviews Sagnier.

"Nothing is pushed, it's a notably chaste picture, reasonably faithful to the century-old case but at a discreet distance from the sensationalism of our own era, and likely to strike an audience primed for more as detached," writes Robert Cashill. "But that cautious remove is part of the Chabrol bloodline."

Online listening tip. Sagnier is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Update, 8/18: "If anything, the older people seem to attract Chabrol more, despite his Charles-like fondness for young flesh; age has made them not wiser but more civilized and therefore, from his point of view, more corrupt," writes the New Yorker's Anthony Lane. "The director is 78 now, with almost 70 films under his belt. He remains as committed as ever to his twin duties of scourge and hedonist, yet I can't help wishing that he would, just once, cast off his own good narrative manners - do away with the irritations of a film like A Girl Cut in Two, which is never more than semi-plausible, and arrange his passions, as the elderly Buñuel did in That Obscure Object of Desire, into shameless, surreal anagrams of wit and lust."

Posted by dwhudson at August 15, 2008 6:22 AM