Product: 8 Women (2002)
Rating: 4.0
Farcical who done it with chanson
This farcical "who done it" is funny, absurd, campish, and silly all at the same time. Starring a kind of premiere selection of leading ladies of the French cinema, 8 femmes reminds me of similar tongue-in-cheek "who done its" such as Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians and especially Neil Simon's Murder by Death.Adapted from the play by Robert Thomas, which accounts for the stage play feel to the production, this one begins--as a proper murder mystery might--with a murder in a well-appointed house out in the country. Somehow everyone is stranded there and of course under suspicion. While Neil Simon made fun of detectives in Murder by Death, and Agatha Christie made fun of murder, period, here the fun is on the players themselves. What follows, as all point fingers away from themselves, is a whole lot of dirty laundry and closet skeletons being tossed about.The scandalous revelations, including interracial lesbianism, same- and heterosexual incest, etc., are particularly ironic since the film is set in the staid fifties. (Note Suzon's pink/orange pony skirt.) To quote a line from the film, "it's a sad family affair" played for laughs with a kind of absurdist delight. Yet, there is no nudity or anything resembling sexual titillation anywhere in the film. Strange.In another sense this is a celebration of some of the French cinema's leading ladies who get to strut their stuff and play it for laughs.Catherine Deneuve heads the cast as Gaby the wife of the murdered. She looks stately, beautiful and more than a bit spoiled. Danielle Darrieux at 85 steals a few scenes as the mother, Mamy. Isabelle Huppert makes herself into a neurotic, dotty old maid named Augustine while Emmanuelle Beart plays Louise, the sexy maid. Fanny Ardant is Pierrette, Gaby's scandalous sister-in-law. The cast takes turns doing lightweight song and dance numbers which tends to fluff out the production in a sweet fifties-ish way. In a kind of gender joke, no men appear in the movie, although we do see the back of Marcel (Gaby's husband) a couple of times.You will not be able to guess who done it, but I will not tell you why.See this for Danielle Darrieux, one the grande dames of the French cinema whose film credits go back to 1931--yes, 1931. She has a lot of fun in a juicy part.