So anyway, having been at the Immigration Museum and generally out and about during the afternoon, I found myself alone at 5.30 and repaired to one of my city watering holes (Murmur) for a few glasses of wine and a few chapters of The Counterfeiters. Arriving home a bit later, it occurred to me that this might be a suitable state in which to renew my acquaintance with François Ozon's delightful and confounding 8 Femmes (a film which really demands its French title, I reckon).
I don't even know where to begin writing about this film - it's just so very. (Penny once said that she found it terrifying, and I can see where she was coming from, though I can't put the reasons for it into words.) The colours are a big part of it - each character has an Outfit (in a couple of cases, more than one) and bright doesn't begin to describe them (nor the set design)...everything is immaculate. The gleefully, ridiculously melodramatic way in which Ozon piles revelation upon revelation upon revelation reminds us that we're watching a farce...and then there are the musical numbers. I bought the soundtrack straight after watching 8 Femmes the first time round, but even the familiarity with the music that that's brought didn't dilute the effect of seeing these eight women take it in turns to break into song, complete with over the top gestures and dramatic acting (in fact, if anything, it made it even more surreal). Nearly every time it happened, I started laughing - I couldn't help myself. It's just so sublimely weird.
Then, too, there are so many scenes to savour - Virginie Ledoyen and Emmanuelle Beart icily circling each other (the latter pouting, as she does throughout the film, as if her life depended on it), the grand old dame Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant rolling around and grappling undignifiedly on the carpet (first le cat fight, then le sapphism...again), Isabelle Huppert going into repressed-spinster hysterics...and a thousand tiny little interactions - the one that comes to mind is Ardant puffing smoke in the face of Ledoyen, and the offended mini-flounce away with which the latter responds...though the moment when Deneuve breaks a bottle over Danielle Darrieux's head is pretty good, too.
Brightly candy-coloured and very funny, yes, but 8 Femmes has a darkness at its heart (in fact, as soon as one stops to think about what the characters are actually doing, and have done, and have had done to them, it comes to seem positively horrific). As the final song goes, il n'y a pas d'amour heureux, but the film's dark vision extends well beyond the tricks that love etc can play. And somehow, too (and I've no idea how Ozon does this, unless it's simply the cheap tricks and easy pathos of melodrama - and I don't think that it is), the viewer is brought to sympathise with the characters. When Huppert sang her song, I felt misty-eyed; when Firmine Richard was scorned, I felt her hurt; and so on with all of them, as their secrets are brought out into the light, one by one.
In case it isn't obvious, I love this film. And I've never seen anything at all like it.
