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8 WOMEN
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Ever since the improbable success of Les Miserables – starvation! poverty! song and dance! – we have been subjected to famous directors making fools of themselves with ill-conceived musicals: Woody Allen's embarrassing Everyone Says I Love You, bringing discredit to everyone involved (Alan Alda crooning is a moment whose exquisite pain never fades), and Kenneth Branagh's cliff-notes-to-music version of Love's Labours Lost featuring a painfully bad Alicia Silverstone. Now French wunderkind Francois Ozon, who produced the gripping if static Under the Sand, succumbs to the same vice, tossing in liberal dollops of The Women mixed with Clue, and produces … a train wreck.
Imagine the classic English country-house murder, transplanted to snowy France: Marcel, brother of Pierrette (Fanny Ardant), is married to Gaby (Catherine Deneuve), and father to Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) and Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier). Gaby's aggressive neurotic sister Augustine (Isabelle Huppert), housemaid Louise (Emmanuelle Beart), cook Chanel (Firmine Richard), and mother-in-law Mamy (Dannielle Darrieux) complete the ensemble.
We are supposed to have lightheaded comic revelations about each character, defined around breaks into song … but the plot is so gauzy and improbable, the directing so over-the-top, the acting so intermittent – we learn once and for all that Emmanuelle Beart and Fanny Ardant can act, Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve can't – that we are never able to settle into the thing's intended rhythm.
I think Ozon wanted to do an homage to the Fabulous Fifties, from the setting (in glorious Technicolor) to the costumes (Ledoyen's Suzon wears a full Audrey Hepburn ensemble down to the teeny red beret, Beart is dressed in the sort of French maid costume now only worn by men in joke-porn commercials). I think he wanted us to have a retro-Mousetrap experience such as Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound … but he forgot to give us a genuine mystery, or even witty dialog. Rarely does one see so much talent put to utter waste.
You may read reviews suggesting that this is a lighthearted, witty romp. Do not believe them, they are unwilling to face the reality: in trying to juggle too many plates, director Ozon has crashed them all. If you truly want to remember those bygone Fifties, rent the original Pink Panther on videotape, which did it all (except the singing) naturally, and better.