The girl cut in two/La fille coupée en deux

THE GIRL CUT in two of the title goes by the name of Gabrielle Deneige. In case your French isn’t up to it, one of the characters remarks (or rather his subtitles do) how appropriate it is that the young lady is named “Snow”.

He is alluding to Gabrielle’s job as a weather person, but one can’t help but think how chilly this latest Claude Chabrol film feels. No surprises there, you might remark. The great man, now 78, has always constructed mazes through which to nudge his cynical characters. Nobody is likely to confuse him with Richard Curtis.

Sure enough, The Girl Cut in Two, inspired by a real event, finds endlessly uncomfortable things to do with its sticky love triangle (quadrilateral?). Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) begins an affair with Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), a distinguished writer many years her senior, and, despite his encouraging her into sordid sexual threesomes, fools herself into believing that he may still leave his wife.

Meanwhile, Paul (Benoît Magimel), a dissolute young moneybags, has fallen in love with the weathergirl and dedicates himself to prying her away from Saint-Denis. When the author fails to return from a trip abroad, the younger man pounces, with ultimately tragic results.

Sagnier is charismatic as the lanky, fragile heroine, and Berléand allows just enough brimstone into his portrayal of a largely amoral egotist. Saddled with a jacket made from Hilda Ogden’s curtains and a haircut borrowed from the young Steve Strange, Magimel just about manages to avoid making a caricature of his degenerate fop.

But, whereas early Chabrol films had the sinister coolness of classic Hitchcock, the new picture is cold like uneaten soup or congealed sausages. Shot in flat, unhurried style, featuring the director's trademark fades to black, The Girl Cut in Two offers us characters who are not just unlikeable, but almost entirely unknowable.

Shuffling around like pieces in a sophisticated game whose rules we never discover, they have to wait a good hour before the spine of the story swells though the film’s clammy skin. By the time the soap opera finally transform itself into tragedy it has become difficult to care about these three unmotivated ciphers.

None of which is to suggest the film is not a work of quality. It is, however, something to be admired rather than enjoyed. Brrr!