Product: 8 Women (2002)
Rating: 2.0
cutesy, cloying farce
"8 Women" is a corny throwback to all those archaic stage melodramas in which an assortment of oddball characters become prime suspects in a grizzly murder. These tales inevitably take place in some isolated setting cut off from the outside world (an elegant French home inundated by a perpetual blizzard is the locale here), with each of the characters having more than ample motive for committing the crime. As "the plot thickens," the characters reveal all the deep dark secrets that have been lurking beneath the placid surface of a polite, bourgeois existence. A whole genre of drawing-room farces has been built around this premise in the past - and the wonder is that anyone felt the compelling need to revive it now.Well, writer/director Francois Ozon obviously did and turned to Robert Thomas' play for his source of inspiration (if one chooses to apply so lofty a term to describe what ends up on the screen). In the film, Catherine Deneuve, Isabel Huppert Fanny Ardant, Danielle Darrieux and Emmanuelle Beart portray just some of the women who play an important part in the life of Marcel, the man who is discovered dead one morning, the victim of a knife stab to the back.Since this is obviously intended as an homage to a type of harmless entertainment that has long since passed from the scene, it seems a bit curmudgeonly of me to point out that "8 Women" is a fairly appalling misfire, an exercise in style whose archness and cloyingness quite literally set the teeth on edge. Just because a film is intended as a "pastiche" does not give it carte blanche to be as bad as this one turns out to be. Every moment of the film feels excruciatingly self-conscious and cutesy, as if the writer and director were winking at us, making us feel good about ourselves for being clever and sophisticated enough to get the joke. This is never more the case than in the lame, off-putting musical numbers that the characters launch into at a moment's notice. The filmmakers underscore the theatrical ambiance of the original piece by retaining the elaborate single set and the patently artificial backdrops - and the film is certainly pretty to look at what with all the splashes of flashy color emanating from the period furnishings and costumes (the film is set in the 1950's and the photography captures the glossy look of the films of that era). The ladies - fine actresses all - pull off their roles fairly well, but some of them do get a bit irritating at times. However, I choose to blame the material rather than the actresses themselves for this turn of events."8 Women" is an attempt to revive the classic drawing room farce with just enough modern "spin" to make it appear relevant (there's a heavy emphasis on lesbianism, for example, to give this antiquated vehicle its up-to-the-minute, 21st Century sheen). It's a shame, given all the talent involved here, that the film turns out to have all the charm, wit and pertinence of one of those "Murder Mystery/Crime-Solving Weekends" that people were flocking to in the 1980's and `90's, designed for all those amateur detectives and Sherlock Holmes wannabes who simply weren't content to do their sleuthing from the comfort of their own armchairs at home and felt compelled to try their hand at it in public. "8 Women" is pretty much on that level.