Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Danielle Darrieux, Emanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant

Director: François Ozon

Screenplay: François Ozon

Running time: 1 hr 51 mins

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Musical



CRITIQUE:


The plot of François Ozon’s 8 Femmes is so purposefully implausible that you’d be rolling your eyes throughout its Technicolor patina: eight interrelated women are stranded in a snow-bound country mansion when the master of the house is murdered, stabbed in the back whilst asleep. All of them become suspects and begin to interrogate each other – and soon, a deluge of double-crossing, backstabbing and bitchfights ensue as family revelations and skeletons in the closet aren’t revealed as much as laid bare. It’s really Agatha Christie, but only with maximum kitsch. And if you’re taking this seriously, gnawing and spitting on its ridiculous plot machinations, you’re entirely missing some good campy fun.


Obviously Ozon’s intention is not realism, but rather a self-conscious superficiality of this material. 8 Femmes is a gleeful melange of a handful of genres – musical, whodunit, murder-mystery, comedy, melodrama and family soap-opera – genres that shouldn’t work well together but are pulled off effectively. Compare this to Billy Wilder in steroids. The theatricality, ensembles, vibrant colour palettes hark back to the 1950s Hollywood Technicolor musicals of MGM, which Ozon clearly, and ironically, pays homage and lampoons at the same time, where characters suddenly break out into a spotlight-hued musical number. Ardant’s Pierette embodies a sultry femme fatale with her red-draped jazz number, and Catherine Deneuve’s Gaby gets a breather and a strut with her classy emerald body-hugging ensemble. Here, amid the fracas, head-butting and ambiguous lesbian innuendos, each one pause and gets to sing. It’s a bonkers concept, a songbook of French pop songs recycled to tongue-in-cheek farce.


But the strength of the film really lies on its superlative casting. Convening as many French cinematic icons, like a roll call in France’s Hall of Fame, who are game enough to parody their selves and still end up gloriously delightful to watch, each one stages their own marks of their performances, most prominently Isabelle Huppert’s deliriously jittery spinster, throwing paroxysms of tirade at every opportunity and then draws an unexpectedly devious character arc as she gets a Gilda-esque makeover. And what could be better to watch Deneuve breaks her glacial cool when she literally smashes a wine bottle on Darrieux’s head?


VERDICT:

High camp, pure kitsch, but scrumptious, irresistible entertainment. François Ozon mounts a superficial production with overt theatricality, genre machinations and film-book visual self-consciousness, but only to deliberately peel layers of the characters’ façades and reveal the many different facets of the female psyche.




RATING: B+