A Girl Cut in Two

In this thriller from master director Claude Chabrol, Francçois Berléand stars as a jaded novelist and a too happily married "ladies man" whose latest conquest is TV weathergirl Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier, who turned heads in SWIMMING POOL). At once naïve and unstoppable, Gabrielle doesn't need to be convinced to enter into a sordid May-September relationship with a celebrated member of the intelligentsia. However, tugging at her other arm with the pull of the entire haute bourgeoisie is young Paul (Benoît Magimel of THE PIANO TEACHER), the cute but dangerously schizophrenic scion of a Lyon pharmaceutical magnate. What's a girl to do? Appropriately, the story takes as its starting point a famous Gilded Age crime of passion, the murder of Madison Square Garden architect and notorious womanizer Stanford White. "Sex, murder, insanity, perversity - a singularly classy and sophisticated drama. It's erotic without showing skin, brutal but never bloody." - NEWSDAY. From IFC Films.