A Girl Cut in Two

New from The Movie Snob

A Girl Cut in Two (C). I decided to see this French movie based on the good grade it got from the Dallas Morning News -- I didn't read the whole review, just enough to assure myself that it's not some sort of slasher flick. Anyhoo, it's a sad movie about a girl who chooses badly in love and pays the price. Gabrielle (played by Ludivine Sagnier, who was Tinkerbell in the recent live-action Peter Pan) is a pretty, young weathergirl in the French city of Lyon. She attracts the interest of a loathsome man, Charles Saint-Denis, who is a successful novelist, well into his 60's, and married. Inexplicably (to me), Gabrielle falls in love with him. Gabrielle's mother, with whom she still lives, is justifiably concerned, but she seems to lack the resources to get in Gabrielle's face and demand she face the fact that the old lecher's promises to leave his wife mean no more to him than his wedding vows did. When he finally tires of Gabrielle, she makes a second disastrous decision, to submit to the advances of a wealthy but unstable man about her age who has been chasing her and denigrating Saint-Denis the whole movie. Gabrielle's education in the school of hard knocks is hard to watch, but at least the director didn't pretend that "enlightened" European attitudes about sex and marriage inevitably lead to a blissful utopia.