8 Women

In glancing over discussions of Francois Ozon's new film 8 Women (or 8 Femmes if you're the sort who needs proper translations), one important thing becomes clear Ozon's originality here comes specifically from his absence of originality. 8 Women is a pastiche of a wildly disparate array of cultural references. It has the in-gender distaff feuding of Claire Boothe Luce's The Women. It has the stylized family melodrama of Douglas Sirk. It has the chamber/mansion murder mystery style of Agatha Christie. It makes internal specific references to all of these styles in the way that only a post-modern auteur can manage. And it features eight of the best actresses working today in French cinema. And then? 8 Women has each of them sing a French song popular in the 1950s and 1960s. But lest you think that 8 Women is basically Clue meets Everyone Says I Love You meets All That Heaven Allows meets Polyester... Actually, that may not be such a bad description. A campy pleasure that gets increasingly twisted and sordid as it goes along, 8 Women may wear its pleasures mostly on the surface, but there's a lot of fun to be had with that multi-textured superficiality.

Twas a few nights before Christmas and as the snow falls outside a lovely country manor, lovely Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) arrives home on a school holiday to greet her mother Gaby (Catherine Deneuve), teenage sister Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier), grandmother Mamy (Danielle Darrieux), aunt Augustine (Isabelle Huppert), and favorite maid Chanel (Firmine Richard). She also discovers that the house has another new maid, Louise (Emmanuelle Beart). And in case you were worried that I've only listed seven women, there are also rumors that Suzon's father's estranged sister Pierrette (Fanny Ardant) has been skulking around the house trying to get back on his good graces and back in his will. But when Louise goes upstairs to wake Marcel, the man of the house, she discovers him in bed, face down, with a knife plunged in his back. The phone lines have been cut. The car has been disabled. And the gate won't open. The women are trapped, stranded, and Louise has a more interesting piece of information the night before, the dogs didn't bark. So the killer must have been somebody Marcel knew! The killer must be one of the 8 women!

And, in classical mystery tradition, the eight women are all liars and all had motivations to kill Marcel and even if they didn't kill Marcel, there were a whole lot of shady dealings the night before in his bedroom. So who's the murderer?

Suzon, is a pretty-in-pink perfect coed who gets good grades and has a handsome banker boyfriend and is the apple of everybody's eye. But she has a big secret and even that secret has another secret attached. And darned if I'm going to spoil either except to say that Suzon isn't the perfect little Miss she appears to be. But surely you would have guessed that anyway.

Catherine is the daughter with lesser grades and a bad attitude. She resents her father for treating her like a little girl, as she sings "Papa, you're behind the times." She also resents each of her relatives for various reasons. She looks like an innocent, but is she?

Augustine is the spinster aunt with severe hair, big glasses, and more-than-a-little hatred for her sister Gaby, who has taken her in and supported her for years. She also has a heart condition that may or may not be faked. And did Augustine have feelings for Marcel? And beneath that spinster exterior, is there a wild-child ready to come out?

Gaby likes Marcel's money, but already the couple has been sleeping in different rooms. She stands to inherit more than half of Marcel's fortune. That's gotta make her a prime suspect, doesn't it?

Louise may be the hottest maid in the history of the world and she has a history of seducing her employers. She also may have been the last person to see Marcel alive. That doesn't look good.

Mamy is an alcoholic, living with her two daughters. She seems harmless enough, confined to a wheelchair, but does she actually need the wheelchair? And what is the big secret involving the death of *her* husband?

Pierrette is, admittedly, a former exotic dancer fallen on hard times. But was she able to get Marcel to add her to the will? And how convenient for her would if be if Marcel were to have died moments after? But does Pierrette have even bigger secrets? Duh.

Chanel is just the old family maid. She couldn't have any secrets could she? Well, duh. Plus, by halfway through the movie, Chanel know more than she's telling anybody about the murder...

So everybody's suspect. and if you've already guessed that for Ozon, the murder is little more than a red herring anyway. OK. It's not officially a red herring, since every conversation deals only with finding the murderer, but Ozon is more interested in the complicated explanations that each character might have for killing Marcel. And before the film is done, Ozon will take 8 Women far from the conventional melodrama of Sirk into more tawdry stuff entirely several different kinds of incest, several different permutations of lesbian relationships, countless confusing affairs, and more than one variation of pure Vertigo-esque obsession. And if you don't think it's worth the price of admission to wait for Fanny Ardant and Catherine Deneuve to have a cat-fight, well, you just don't like your French movies campy. I assure you, it's a total pleasure.

The script for 8 Women was adapted by Ozon and Marina de Van from a play by Robert Thomas. My understanding is that the play is just a vehicle for the filmmakers to get a bunch of glamorous women in a hour together and let them play off their respective iconic images. The mystery is twisty and turny, but I don't remember any particularly sharp dialogue or anything major shocking revelations. [Actually, at a certain point, each and every line of dialogue becomes a revelation in the "OK, well, I guess I lied about that, but when are *you* going to admit where *you* really were" form.] Mostly, the women all get to be catty in various ways and even if the writing isn't sharp, the performances are. And why else were you going to see this movie?

The actors alternate between the women playing against type and those playing condensed versions of their normal screen personas. In the latter category is Deneuve, standing aloof and distant above the fray of accusations. She may be a prime subject, but she remains in a minor variation of her Ice Queen persona until things grow hectic. Her distance also adds to the funniest moment in the entire film involving Deneuve and a whiskey bottle. As Mamy, Danielle Darrieux plays Denueve's mother for the third time on screen, so that can't be much of a stretch. Ledoyen plays off both her naturally innocent visage and some of the sexier roles she's had onscreen. American audiences know Ledoyen (if they know her at all) from her part as Leonardo DiCaprio's love interest in The Beach, but her roles her her native land have usually been even raunchier stuff. Here, all of the bad stuff is only hinted at in conversations, which she remains externally pristine with her ponytail and bobby-soxer dress. Fanny Ardant (formerly Truffaut's girlfriend, but probably more familiar to American audiences as Mary of Guise in Elizabeth) has matured into the fifty-something sex-kitten she now plays. Like Denueve, Ardant is a stunning woman and if this were Hollywood, she'd be stuck playing relics or grandmothers, rather than va-va-voom mystery ladies like she gets here.

Isabelle Huppert has long been hailed as one of France's most versatile actresses, but this was the first time I've ever seen her play comedy. And she's hilariously arch in her performance of pursed lips, rolling eyes, and brittle movements. And when her character dramatically shifts gears in the final twenty minutes, because it's Huppert, the transition makes vastly more sense.

My favorite of the performances, and the film's best visual running gag, is Emmanuelle Beart. If I were to cast a vote for France's sexiest brunette, Beart would probably get my vote every time, but Stateside she's known old from her "Hooked On Phonics Doesn't Work For Me" butchering of the English language in Mission: Impossible. She's fabulously stunning, but here she walks on screen with blond hair done up tightly above her head and a French maid's outfit buttoned to her neck. And instantly she becomes a walking ticking time bomb. The entire movie seems to be building towards the inevitable, inexorably approaching moment where she's gonna reduce her attire and let down her hair, Gilda-style. And when the moment finally occurs, it justifies the wait.

The actresses are all funny (Beart, Ardant, and Huppert as the standouts) and they all get to be effectively melodramatic (points here to Deneuve and Ledoyen). And their musical moments, sung by the actors, are pleasing (Ludivine Sagnier, in particular, lights up the screen when singing and dancing, in a way that her non-musical performance doesn't match). Still, it's difficult to argue that Ozon is using these wonderful actresses as characters or mining them for quality performances. They're props and visual gags and collective nostalgia for filmgoers.

These are women who love and reward a good close-up and Ozon is a director who's generous with those close-ups. An early scene of interrogation cuts from close-up to close-up to close-up for over five minutes, a choice that most directors just couldn't get away with. Ozon also moves these actresses around in the stylized and theatrical house-set. Snow is always falling out the window and you know that lots of time was put into the selection of the green wallpaper with gold diamonds. You know that each woman's costuming probably took longer than the memorization of dialogue and you can tell the moments that Ozon must have most loved filmming. Jeanne Lapoirie's cinematography is pure 50s/60s Technicolor and Pascaline Chavanne's costumes would be Oscar-worthy is this film could attract enough attention. The ghost of Sirk hovers above the entire production, which includes specific visual allusions to All That Heaven Allows. Everything is precise and Classic Hollywood-stylized in every details including the curl of Ardant's cigarette smoke. Ozon does, however, keep the scale small. The musical numbers are surprisingly restrained and underchoreographed. I guess Ozon didn't want to entirely undercut the domestic melodrama. Similarly, while the backstory includes family sins that the Production Code would never have allowed Sirk, what's actually onscreen is fairly tame. For a French film to star this many beautiful women and for all of them to remained fully clothed for the entire film is somewhat remarkable. There's very little violence, though the end is shocking and intense, though again, not graphic.

I'm not sure if 8 Women would work if you went into it totally unprepared for the tone shifts and genre conventions that Ozon relies upon. When Sagnier first broke into song, somebody behind me at the theatre let out a surprised and not so-happy expletive and grumbled through the rest of the movie. If you're prepared for the murder, the melodrama, and the music, but also prepared for the cinema references and humor, 8 Women is a real treat. And I can't tell you how thankful I am for France's most valuable natural resource beautiful and talented women.

*******
OTHER PARTICIPANTS IN THIS WRITE OFF, HOSTED BY Remnjava, (Carol) ARE: azielinski, d_fienberg (wait, that's me), artbyjude, granniemose, kld718, Marytara, Melissarn, priyatha

Check out remnjava's profile page for details and links to those reviews. And I apologize for being thankful for something so frivolous but, what can I say? I am...