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 The Arts and Education Council’s Fall Film Series will show its final film at the Carmike Bijou starting Friday—director Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut In Two (La fille coupee en deux). Hailed in some circles as “the French Alfred Hitchcock”, Chabrol is still directing films at age 79. A Girl Cut In Two (shown in French with English subtitles) was an official selection at prestigious films festivals in Venice, Toronto, and New York and makes its way to Chattanooga this weekend.
Chabrol’s films (particularly his thrillers) are often concerned with a clash between romantic passion and constantly shifting bourgeois values. A Girl Cut In Two is no different, as it concerns Gabrielle, a French TV weather girl who is torn between two lovers: an aged, rich, married author who won’t leave his wife and a frenzied young heir to industrial fortune.
Obsession ensues as Gabrielle marries the young man and he becomes increasingly obsessed with her shifting passions. Before long, Gabrielle finds herself up against emotional and societal forces far beyond her control, leading to an inevitable clash between her two lovers.
The film has been met with some glowing reviews, praising Chabrol for maintaining his status as a master of suspense and noting his storytelling in this film shows more than a dash of his trademark eviscerating wit. It’s a smooth-moving potboiler that dabbles in melodrama, yet still packs a sophisticated punch.
Director Claude Chabrol got his start in film as a critic when he became a member of the infamous group of French cinema-lovers called Les Cahiers du cinema. Started by Frenchman André Bazin in 1953, the group single-handedly birthed the movement known as the “French New Wave”.
These young men and women were crazy about movies, wanting to see them advance into a more respectable art form. They refused to review the sub-par films being produced by French studios and desired to articulate new standards for film aesthetics by looking at films from a visual perspective, reading meaning into every frame.
The Cahiers group worshipped the films of Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Carl Th. Dreyer, Alfred Hitchcock, and others. Some of the critics eventually branched out into making films of their own. Though their work was gritty and experimental at first, some of France’s best-known filmmakers emerged from this group—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alan Resnais, and Claude Chabrol.
Chabrol made his first film in 1958 after being maddened by the French government’s control of the film industry. Using funds his wife inherited, the soon-to-be auteur created his own production company, borrowed a camera, and headed off to the French countryside to film Bitter Reunion.
The Cahiers group soon began to view him as a dilettante, but his work has endured. His films The Butcher, This Man Must Die, The Ceremony, and The Unfaithful Wife are all masterpieces in their own right.
Claude Chabrol is a major figure in film history and the fact that he is still making films is a testament to his tenacity and passion. Although A Girl Cut In Two may not touch the brilliance of his groundbreaking work during the French New Wave, it is a film made from years of experience in both the mechanics of French society and the virtues of cinematic art.
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