Product: 8 Women (2002)
Rating: 2.0
I want my 2 hours back!
Catherine Deneuve, French cinema, 8 women and a whodunnit--I had high expectations for this film, all disappointed.It's a movie without a center, around characters with no depth or development. The musical numbers are curiosities, entertaining in themselves, but jarring every time you are taken out of "real" movie time into musical time. The two genres, country house murder and musical, do not mix well.The bigger problem is the story. Whodunnits aren't known for their depth, but these characters are complete cardboard. Worse, they change according to the needs of the scene/story. They have no center, no reality. Even the sexual orientation of some characters changes scene to scene.The actresses do the best with what they are given. The trouble is, it's almost nothing.At one point, the murdered man's daughter says something about him that changes your whole view of him. It's never referred to again, with no clue as to whether it was true or a lie. A good example of how this is a movie with no center.A powerful ending could have redeemed it. Instead, there was a flashy but pointless twist. There was no insight, no depth, no redemption. If the story had a point, it seemed to be women=bad, men=good.The best thing I can say about it, aside from the costumes, are that the writer understands how to write a story with characters who reveal their secrets a bit at a time. In that sense, the story was well structured, even interesting up to a point.Mostly, this movie felt like some director's excuse to get famous actresses in nice costumes on a sound stage. They emote away, but it's two hours on a train to nowhere.