The Girl Cut in Two

The Gallic Hitchcock, the French master of suspense and countless other variations have been employed to compare Claude Chabrol to the British director. ‘The Girl Cut in Two’ reinforces this affinity further. In his late seventies and having passed the fifty-feature mark, the veteran auteur, in the vain of his British predecessor, shows no signs of stopping with another gripping tale abound with passion, jealously, murder and foul-play. Chabrol takes a true story for his source material, where a fatal love triangle involving a renowned architect, a model/aspiring music hall actress and a millionaire playboy caused a scandal in the early 1900s US. This stranger than fiction tale formed the basis for a 50s' film starring Ray Milland, Elisabeth Taylor and Farley Granger. In Chabrol’s version, an equally esteemed cast play out this taut thriller of human weakness and vindictiveness with the respected Francois Berléand (‘Au revoir les enfants’, ‘Tell No-one’), the fast-rising Ludivine Sagnier (‘Swimming Pool’, ‘Mesrine’), and the art-house darling Benoit Magimel (‘The Piano Teacher’, ‘24 mesures’) in the lead roles.