La Fille Coupée en Deux (The Girl Cut in Two) (A Girl Cut in Two) (2007)
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Reviews Counted: 84
Fresh: 62 | Rotten: 22
Nouvelle Vague master Claude Chabrol balances subtle stabs of humor and biting class criticism to explore a love story and the seedier side of the haute bourgeois.
Average Rating: 7.5/10
Critic Reviews: 21
Fresh: 19 | Rotten: 2
Nouvelle Vague master Claude Chabrol balances subtle stabs of humor and biting class criticism to explore a love story and the seedier side of the haute bourgeois.
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Average Rating: 2.9/5
User Ratings: 2,659
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Movie Info
A television weatherwoman is pursued simultaneously by a spoiled pharmaceutical heir and a successful -- but much older -- writer in director Claude Chabrol's blackly comic tale of romance and class differences. Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier) has a high-profile job detailing the forecast on French TV. Yet despite Gabrielle's staunch work ethic, she values her privacy over her professional career and lives in a modest house with her aging mother (Marie Bunel). One day, renowned author
Cast
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Ludivine Sagnier
Gabrielle Deneige -
Benoît Magimel
Paul Gaudens -
François Berléand
Charles Saint-Denis -
Mathilda May
Capucine Jamet -
Caroline Sihol
Geneviève Gaudens, Gen... -
Marie Bunel
Marie Deneige -
Valeria Cavalli
Dona Saint-Denis -
Etienne Chicot
Denis Deniege -
Thomas Chabrol
Maître Lorbach, Maître... -
Jean-Marie Winling
Gérardk Briançon, Gér... -
Didier Benureau
Philippe Le Riou -
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All Critics (90) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (64) | Rotten (22) | DVD (3)
This is one of Chabrol's most elegant, acerbic and heartfelt entertainments in years.
Top CriticClaude Chabrol's capacity to make shopworn material seem almost new is especially evident in this 2007 drama.
While not a classic, this is a pleasantly disturbing, nominally voyeuristic romp in the territory Chabrol knows best.
Spectacularly assured, A Girl Cut in Two keeps you off-balance as it establishes a world where every conversation is a flirtation, and trouble and heartbreak sneak in on little cat feet when no one's looking.
More than a century later, this is still a juicy story, and the actors don't back away from its more hysterical flourishes.
Chabrol is a past master at visual storytelling and a stiletto wit.
Another patented Chabrol commentary, not a morality play but something far more worldly and difficult to ignore.
Chabrol's astute dissection of sex, class and show business. Bravo, Claude, a rare man in profound touch with the darker impulses of his species.
Chabrol's astute dissection of sex, class and show business. Bravo, Claude, a rare man in profound touch with the darker impulses of his species.
It's not fresh material, but in the hands of a master like Chabrol it appears like a fresh breeze.
Talk is everything, with action hinted at the edges, as Chabrol's camera sidles off to look at a casually thrown book, or skates away from anything salacious.
Though the performances are all first-rate, the film is let down by weak characterisation. Still, it's enjoyable, if not exceptional.
This description may make this movie sound much more interesting than it is.
One's final impression is that aging legends make unreliable puppet-masters. And that it's all too easy for a desirable young actress to be left dangling in mid-air.
The relationships are never completely convincing and there are too many unresolved questions to create an entirely satisfying tale.
Too cold and cynical to be truly enjoyed but the old dog still has a few new tricks up his sleeve.
The performances drip with cliché, while the narrative is all over the place: plot developments are either clumsily telegraphed or given the flimsiest of dramatic explanation.
With elegance and despatch, veteran new wave master Claude Chabrol has brought off his most enjoyable film for some time.
Chabrol may be one of the great survivors of the New Wave, but this is an old man's film.
Patronising, unsexy, and heavy with the musty smell of a director past his sell-by-date, you're advised to cut this off at the ankles.
An elegant, darkly amusing effort that relishes taking digs at the middle-classes while leaving its characters' supposedly perverse acts firmly to our imaginations.
Most people won't care enough about these people or believe in their relationships to sit out all 115 minutes of this icily mannered film that continually hints at darker, more subversive themes of sado-masochism than it dares to explore.
Heavy-handed French drama is a clumsy affair.
By the time the story springs to life and becomes the thriller, of sorts, that it seems set up to be, we have had to sit through 90-odd minutes of turgid melodrama.
Audience Reviews for La Fille Coupée en Deux (The Girl Cut in Two) (A Girl Cut in Two)
Super Reviewer
It's a rather French movie about a woman (Sagnier) who is pursued by two men, a young and emotionally volatile rich man, and an older married writer. Both men are ultimately bad options, and the movie quickly changes from something of a charming romantic film to something much darker in tone. It could be called "a movie cut in two", if a person wanted to be clever (which I do).
Anyway, neither half of the movie was particularly good, in my opinion. The narrative tended to wander, Sagnier's character seemed silly and unsympathetic with little explanation of why, and the other characters were almost universally unlikable or uninteresting. Combine all that with the odd (and not in a compelling way) ending, and The Girl Cut in Two becomes a movie that I probably wouldn't recommend.
Super Reviewer
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Foreign Titles
- Die zweigeteilte Frau (DE)
- The Girl Cut in Two (La Fille coupee en deux) (UK)
