A Girl Cut in Two

What made Claude Chabrol’s latest film, A Girl Cut in Two, interesting for me is the number of references to his earlier work, Les Cousins. The names of the two male characters are Paul and Charles. Paul in A Girl Cut in Two has Les Cousins’s Paul’s reckless decadence but has Les Cousins’s Charles’s melodramatic sense of romance. Paul immediately falls in love with Gabrielle but unlike Les Cousins’s Charles, he easily (and sometimes frighteningly) expresses his feelings for her. Charles in A Girl Cut in Two has Les Cousins’s Paul’s ambivalent attitude toward his romantic partners. Like Charles in Les Cousins, Charles in this film dies from a gunshot from Paul. In both films we see Paul pointing the empty gun at someone. In Les Cousins, Paul jokingly aims the gun at Charles to wake him up from his sleep. In A Girl Cut in Two, Paul aims the gun at Gabrielle to scare her into forgetting Charles. These foreshadowing scenes fit the nature of both Charles’s death. In Les Cousins, Paul, unaware that Charles had loaded the gun with a single bullet, accidentally kills Charles while imitating a guest shooting the gun. In A Girl Cut in Two, Paul shoots Charles in the middle of a charity banquet telling everyone that Charles corrupted his wife. The difference between Paul and Charles in Les Cousins and Paul and Charles in A Girl Cut in Two is that the Les Cousins pair has a clear good and bad person. While Chabrol mocks Charles’s country ways, we know that we are supposed to see him as a good person. The A Girl Cut in Two pair lacks that distinction. Both are depicted as flawed people who are accepted for their flaws.

The women in both films are convinced by the men to be more sexually liberal. In Les Cousins, Florence decides that she wants to be with Charles living the idyllic domestic life. However, Paul and Clovis talk her out of it claiming that Charles could never sexually satisfy her the way Paul could. In A Girl Cut in Two, Charles convinces Gabrielle to sleep with his friends while he watches. Oddly, we do not see these scenes in A Girl Cut in Two yet we get them in Les Cousins. In Les Cousins, we see the overhead shot of Florence sitting in a chair as Paul and Clovis circle around her as they tell her that she could never be Charles’s ideal domesticated woman. We see Clovis pushing Paul onto Florence saying “You like his touch” and watching them kiss. In A Girl Cut in Two, we only see them go into the club and up the stairs. Charles introduces Gabrielle to his friends but does not explicitly state why they are there. We only learn about their deal through the dialogue between Gabrielle and Paul.

So why cut those scenes in this film and not in Les Cousins? I can imagine Gabrielle’s first experience at the club to be shot similarly to that scene in Les Cousins with Charles standing in for Clovis and his friend standing in for Paul. Perhaps a scene like that would have made identifying Gabrielle as an innocent victim too easy. In Les Cousins, Florence seems to have the same sexually ambivalent attitude as Paul and Clovis thus allowing Chabrol to maintain the distance between the characters and the viewer. If that scene played out in A Girl Cut in Two, we would see her complicity as a result of Charles’s pressure. With Florence, we would think that she would have slept with Paul anyway. By leaving those scenes out of A Girl Cut in Two, we could entertain the idea that Gabrielle might be more sexually liberal than she appeared.

Is A Girl Cut in Two supposed to be the modern Les Cousins? If it is, then Chabrol might be saying with this film, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”