Nothing Like a Femme
A French Director Serves Up a Soufflé of Murder and Song.



8 WOMEN
Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Danielle Darrieux
Based on a play by Robert Thomas
Written and directed by François Ozon

FRANÇOIS OZON PROBABLY has good French living to thank for the symmetry of his 8 Women, a cinematic bon-bon that stars eight screen beauties in a murder-mystery-musical melodrama-with-a-wink.

For without a lifetime of Gallic wine, cheese and sauces, Danielle Darrieux might never have lived to become a vigorous 85-year-old, and director Ozon, adapting a work by the late French playwright Robert Thomas, could not have found a literal "living legend" to complete his tableaux of divas.

As a movie – and even as a kitsch demi-musical – 8 Women is mostly all "been la, done ça." The plot revolves around the untimely murder (is there any other kind?) of a wealthy philanderer, and Ozon presents it as a benign drawing-room cozy, á la Agatha Christie, rather than film noir. His sets necessarily look artificial, and he often photographs his characters in group long shots, like he’s filming a staged play, except for one dialogue that he presents as a series of extreme closeups, which allow us a moment to study the stunning faces of his stars.

You can’t even call 8 Women very original when its actresses slip out of their dialogue into something less comfortable: That’s when the movie recalls Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, a more challenging experiment in grim drama and jangly song, or even Woody Allen’s dissonant bubbly musical, Everyone Says I Love You.

No, this adroit little entertainment is all about the ladies, and because we can see Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and the others any time we like, it’s about the handsomely withered Darrieux, who began acting in the 1930s and who, in the exotic whirlwind films of Max Ophuls in the ‘50s, personified beauty, caprice and desire.

In 8 Women, Darrieux plays Mamy (a French endearment for "grandma"), the malingering matriarch of a dysfunctional family (is there any other kind?). She’s confined to a wheelchair at the start, but she’s perfectly able to leap to her feet when her son-in-law turns up dead in his bed.

For Mamy and her prissy spinster daughter Augustine (Huppert), Marcel’s death could put them out on the streets: They’ve long been house guests at their in-law’s spacious country mansion. Mamy’s older daughter Gaby (Deneuve), who believes her live-in kin are "torn between jealousy and gratitude," might not let them stay now that the place is hers. Or is it? That’s what Gaby’s daughters – the older Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen), who behaves like a debutante, and Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier), more of a tomboy – want to know about the provisions of their father’s will.

And let’s not forget the servants: "Big" Chanel (Firmine Richard), a hefty black woman who raised Gaby’s two daughters; and the mansion’s new employee, Louise (Emmanuelle Béart) – blond, brusque, and looking terribly suspicious in her petite French maid’s uniform.

Finally, after an Act 1 with only seven suspects, enter (and I do mean "Enter") Pierrette (Ardant), the dead man’s sister, a brazen libertine (is there any other kind?) who peels off her black overcoat to reveal a tasteful scarlet evening dress and, in her introductory song, tells everyone: "What’s the point of living free" – pause for an instrumental bridge – "if I’ve got no one loving me?"

As the scandal-filled story unfolds, 8 Women breaks the ensemble up into smaller groups to create a roux of seething conflicts between young and old, rich and poor, upstairs and downstairs, with a few bizarrely campy asides into same-sex love. Imagine the fun of seeing Deneuve and Ardant wrestle each other to the floor, where they wind up cleavage-to-cleavage. Imagine the family’s shock when they stumble onto the scene just after the bickering women lock lip. Now that’s French cookin’!

The stars of 8 Women sing for themselves, and though they do it well enough not to make the dog howl, Ozon doesn’t invest much in choreography (Deneuve as a backup do-wop dancer is as amusing as it is embarrassing.) He gives every actress a solo, but despite his affection for cinematic classicism, the songs are all French pop, not Hollywood homage.

The acting is uniformly fine, from an unusually cold and sullen Deneuve to an unusually repressed and brittle Huppert, each of whom gently parodies her screen persona along the way (Deneuve with a touch of farce, Huppert with a flash of glamour). Darrieux plays some grand guignol with each of these women, and she sings the closing song with her arm around Sagnier, the baby of the cast. But of all the beauties in 8 Women, I’d say the grand prix goes to the radiant Ardant, a Truffaut protégée (and mother of his child) whose high forehead, raven hair, spacious lips and effervescent smile could pick your pocket.

This morosely comic soufflé about love and greed comes together under the direction a young French filmmaker who seems to try something new each time out. Whether he’s translating Fassbinder into French (Water Drops on Burning Rocks) or denying death in English (Under the Sand), Ozon is ceaselessly interesting to watch, and never more so than in 8 Women. All he forgot to include was a role for Jeanne Moreau, the mythic New Wave actress, and the only woman who can truly bridge the classic era of Darrieux to the modernism that began in the ‘60s with the legend of Deneuve.