Claude Chabrol's La Fille coupée en deux | A Girl Cut in Two (2009)

In twentieth-century America the 'Trial of the century' came very early on in the century: 1906, when the fifty-two-year-old architect Stanford White was shot dead by the psychotic millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, whose ex-wife, model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, had had a long-term sexual relationship with White. The story had already been adapted a few times, and in 2007 was again re-adapted (into the present day) in Claude Chabrol and his daughter-in-law Cécile Maistre's screenplay of La Fille coupée en deux.

Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier) is a very pretty and up-and-coming weather forecaster (Deneige of course means snow – Chabrol loves to play) who rides a moped and lives with her mother Marie (Marie Bunel), who works in a bookshop. She catches the eye of Goncourt-winning novelist Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), who has just published a new novel and has a book signing the next day, where he invites her to an auction where he buys a copy of erotic writer Pierre Louÿs's La Femme et le pantin (1898).* The two are mutually attracted despite the thirty-year gap in ages: he will teach her things sexual, being a libertine who frequents a sex club where everything happens between closed doors.

And at the same time along comes Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), heir to a huge pharmaceutical fortune, a brat who is uses to getting his own way with everything, and is obviously seriously psychologically disturbed. We can guess this from his having to be restrained from strangling Gabrielle when she refuses to kiss him. And yet, Charles having refused to leave his wife for her, she marries Paul. And Paul is jealous of the fact that someone has taught her to go down on him so well, tearing himself apart because Gabrielle can't get Charles out of his head.

So, at a function where Charles is about to give him a speech, Paul shoots him dead. Paul's mother Geneviève (Caroline Sihol), who has never approved of mixed class marriages, tries to get Gabrielle to hush up the affair in court. She doesn't, and although Paul gets off lightly with seven years in prison, the icy Geneviève refuses to allow Gabrielle a cent of the fortune, although Gabrielle at least tells her she's making off with the car.

In the end, we discover the full meaning of the title: Gabrielle is reduced to the status of a magician's assistant, being cut in two.

The plot may creak a bit – no matter how much Paul is worth, would Gabrielle really risk her life by marrying such an egotistical, psychotic person, for instance? – but the hand of Chabrol is still firm, laying into the hypocrisies of the moneyed class, etc, and evidently influenced by Buñuel – as well as Hitchcock, it goes without saying.

*Buñuel adapted this novel into the film Cet obscur objet du désir (1977).