Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

Eight Women
Directed by François Ozon; written by François Ozon and Marina deVan; starring Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Danielle Darrieux, Emmanuelle Béart, Firmine Richard, Virginie Ledoyen, and Ludivine Sagnier.
How to order

To say that Francois Ozon's Eight Women is a giddy cross between Stanley Donan's Funny Face and Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant (with large dollops of The Women and Clue tossed in) is-- while certainly capturing its eccentricities-- to underestimate the juxtaposition of its sheer likableness with its profound, troubling darkness.

On the surface, Eight Women looks like a camp romp. Set in an isolated country manor house during a snow storm, it's the story of Marcel, who is found murdered in his bed, and the eight women-- a.k.a the suspects-- in his life. The casting of some of the leading actresses of French cinema (and dressing them in gorgeous couture) at first seems like a gimmicky camp fest. Catherine Deneuve, as beautiful and glacial as always, plays Gaby, Marcel's unfaithful wife. Isabelle Huppert, restrained in horn-rim glasses and a tight-hair style, is her sister, the seemingly puritanical Augustine. Fanny Ardant, glamorously whorish, is Marcel's semi-estranged sister Pierrette. And the legendary (at 86) Danielle Darrieux is his scheming, hard-drinking mother-in-law. Along with these women the cast includes Emmanuelle Béart as the mysterious, class-conscious maid Louise; Firmine Richard as Madame Chanel, the family retainer and secret-keeper; and Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier as Suzon and Catherine, Marcel and Gaby's daughters.

View our poll archive

As written by Ozon and Marina de Van, Eight Women is set-up and paced as a traditional French drawing-room comedy with a mystery subtext; sort of an updated A Shot in the Dark. But one of the miracles of the film is that director Ozon-- who's always been obsessed with the idea that style is content-- manages to both glorify and then undermine his chosen genre, essentially filming Eight Women from the inside out. We're always aware of how the basic narrative structures are moving (indeed, part of the pleasure here is that we eagerly anticipate them). But we never feel that they are a spectacle we're simply watching, but rather a maze in which we are (rather enjoyably) trapped.

Ozon pulls this off, in part, by highlighting the theatricality of the premise. Never making the mis en scene looking anything other then a stage set, and photographing his actors with the glow of extraordinary lighting, Ozon dismantles the (purposely) creaky stagecraft and forces us to confront our own basic assumptions of theater and film. It's a Brechtian devise that manipulates us while giving great pleasure as well. By adding ten musical numbers-- Ardent has a wonderful sexy strip, Darrieuxis gives a plaintive Jacques Brel-like poem-- Ozon ups the ante and forces the whole production close to the edge of hysterical over-determination.

For all of Eight Women's lightly-campy innuendo and over-the-top fruitiness, the film is a dead-on serious look at the decidedly unhealthy connection between style and character. Sure all of the characters have secrets and foibles-- they are by turns greedy, love-wrenched, lying, conniving, lustful, vengeful, and even murderous-- but these faults are enhanced and exemplified by their enormous, extravagant style. Like in a medieval mystery play, where a character's soul is manifest in his physical being, these women's deficient characters are manifest in their glorious self-presentations as camp images and icons.

Hyper-real

Ozon has always displayed a genius for the excessive and lavish emotion and moment. In See the Sea a quite lesbian interlude becomes murderous. In Criminal Lovers a teen-murder turns into Hansel and Gretel and then becomes a fable of cannibalism and homoerotic love (complete with ogre.) His last film, Under the Sand, a nuanced look at the unpredictability of grief, had images of heartbreaking comedy that were so extreme as to be cruel to the audience. While all of those films were, in their own way, masterful, Ozon goes a step further here and, by creating an immoderate degree of artificiality-- in tone, set, performance, and plot-- he forces us not so much to step outside of his dreamworld, but to enter into it solely on his own terms.

In some ways what he has done here-- borrowing from Brecht, Fassbinder, Hollywood musical, and Almodovar, among others-- is to bring to an outrageous height the camp principle that the essence of emotional experience is found only in the physical display of objects and form. This, of course, is evident in "gay art" from Busby Berkeley to (early) John Waters, from the most basic drag show to high-popular art like the Cockettes. While all of these examples provide varying degrees of enjoyment and emotional fission, none of them come together or offer the emotional payoff of Eight Women. Beautiful, engaging, and consistently (even shockingly) surprising, Ozon's vision and this film are extraordinary.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com