a film written and directed by Francois Ozon
8 Femmes (8 Women)
a film written and directed by Francois Ozon
Here it is at last, the
first Agatha Christie musical. Eight women are isolated in a snowbound cottage,
there is a corpse with a knife in his back, all of the women are potential suspects,
plus six song and dance numbers. The cast is a roll call of French legends.
In alphabetical order: Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, Danielle Darrieux,
Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Ledoyen, Firmine Richard and Ludivine
Sagnier.
From the opening shot, the film cheerfully lets us know it's a spoof of overproduced
Hollywood musicals. We pan past tree branches impossibly laden with picturesque
snow and find a charming cottage where guests are just arriving. Eight women
have gathered to celebrate Christmas with Marcel, who is the husband of Gaby
(Deneuve), the son-in-law of Mamy (Darrieux), the brother-in-law of Aunt Augustine
(Huppert), the father of Catherine (Sagnier) and Suzon (Ledoyen), the employer
of the domestic servants Madame Chanel (Richard) and Louise (Béart),
and the brother of the late-arriving Pierrette (Ardant).
"Monsieur died in his bed with a knife in his back," the assembled
company is informed. And (significant detail required in all isolated rural
murders) "the dogs didn't bark all night." The women absorb this news
while dressed in stunning designer fashions (even the maids look chic) and deployed
around a large, sunny room that looks like nothing so much as a stage set--even
to the detail that all the furniture is behind the actresses most of the time.
Only a couple of brief excursions upstairs prevent the movie from taking place
entirely on this one bright set, where nothing looks used or lived with.
The artificiality is so jolly that we're not surprised when the first song begins,
because 8 Women is in no sense serious about murder, its plot, or anything else.
It's an elaborate excuse to have fun with its cast, and we realize we've been
waiting a long time for Catherine Deneuve to come right out and say of Isabelle
Huppert: "I'm beautiful and rich. She's ugly and poor." I had also
just about given up hope of ever seeing Deneuve and Fanny Ardant rolling around
on the floor pulling each other's hair. In a cast where everybody has fun, Huppert
has the most, as Augustine. She and her mother (Darrieux) have been living rent-free
in Marcel's cottage with her sister (Deneuve), but that has not inspired Augustine
to compromise in her fierce resentment and spinsterish isolation. She stalks
around the set like Whistler's mother, frowning from behind her horn-rims and
making disapproval into a lifestyle.
The other characters quickly fall into approved Agatha Christie patterns. Young
Suzon appoints herself Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps in this case Hercule Poirot,
and begins sniffing out the clues. The sexy Louise is established as the late
Marcel's mistress. Madame Chanel, from French Africa, has been with the family
for years and lives out back in the guest cottage, where, as it develops, she
often plays cards with Pierrette. And Pierrette herself, who arrives late with
the kind of entrance that only the tall, dark and forcible Ardant could pull
off, has secrets which are as amazing as they are inevitable.
I dare not reveal a shred of the plot. And the movie is all plot--that, and
stylish behaviour, and barbed wit, and those musical numbers. Watching 8 Women
you have a silly grin half of the time. Astonishing, that François Ozon,
who directed this, also made "Under the Sand" (2001), that melancholy
record of a wife (Charlotte Rampling) whose husband disappears, apparently drowned,
and who refuses to deal with the fact that he is dead.
Movies like 8 Women are essentially made for movie-lovers. You have to have
seen overdecorated studio musicals, and you have to know who Darrieux and Deneuve
and Béart and Huppert and Ardant are, to get the full flavour. It also
helps if you have seen Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap," now in the
50th year of its London run, with its cast still trapped with the corpse in
the isolated cottage. "Do not give away the secret!" the programme
notes exhort. And here, too. Not that the secret is anything more than one more
twist of the plot's pepper mill.
ROGER EBERT
Neil Young, Jigsaw Lounge: Adapted from a half-forgotten play by Robert Thomas, 8 Femmes makes no attempt to hide its anachronistic atmosphere of amateur-dramatics, even with such a high-calibre cast. Indeed, Ozon positively revels in the camp-as-Christmas artifice of it all, right from the opening titles, picked out in lurid pink over a shot of an ornate chandelier. He even keeps stopping the action to allow each of his stars a musical number. Some of these are elaborate dance sequences, others are more controlled: among the countless in-jokes (film buffs should keep their eyes peeled for Romy Schneider) Huppert gets to revisit Piano Teacher territory when Augustine takes to the keyboard for a soulful lament. And the actress really is first among equals, showing her range by ripping into a rare comic opportunity... Crucially, all the actresses - even the slightly hesitant Deneuve - seem to get what Ozon's up to and go with the flow, with results that are often as least as fizzily enjoyable as anything in Amelie.
BBCi: With tongue firmly placed in cheek, François Ozon offers up for our delight his Agatha Christie-style murder mystery-cum-musical. The eight women in question are all suspects in the murder, and all suspect each other.... As if the mounting ridiculousness of each confession and revelation wasn't enough, each woman has her own song-and-dance routine through which to indulge herself and expound her character, with varying degrees of humour and emotion.... 8 Women oozes acting talent, with each woman sending up her public persona and revelling in the fabulousness of it all .
Washington Post: Let me see if I have this straight: 8 Women is a brand-new, French-language, all-female comedy-murder-mystery-musical based on a play written in the 1960s but set a decade earlier. Um, am I leaving anything out? Oh, yes. It's also really, really good.......with shuttlecocks of barbed dialogue swatted back and forth by an octet of French cinema's nimblest actresses, 8 Women is a hoot. ..In Ozon's dexterous yet playful hands, it manages to be both theatrical farce and serious drama. While broadly poking fun at the conventions of the Hollywood movie musical, the proscenium stage and oh, I don't know, every whodunit Agatha Christie ever wrote, 8 Women also probes the complex dynamics between mothers and daughters, female siblings, mistresses, servants and romantic rivals. Yes, it's over the top, giddy and parodistic (God bless it). But it also takes a thoughtful, if surreptitious, look at what eight women might act like when men aren't around.
Mamy: Danielle
Darrieux Gaby: Catherine Deneuve Augustine: Isabelle Huppert
Suzon: Virginie Ledoyen Catherine: Ludivine Sagnier Pierrette: Fanny Ardant
Louise: Emmanuelle Béart Madame Chanel: Firmine Richard
Written and directed by François Ozon. Adapted from the play by Robert
Thomas
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