San Francisco International Film Festival

By Sara Schieron

To say Ludivine Sagnier has played Tinkerbell is an understatement. For Sagnire, Tinkerbell is a roll she might spend much of her career revisiting.

She appeared prior to the SF International’s screening of Claude Chabrol’s newest film A Girl Cut in Two. Here she played weather girl come TV Anchor Gabriel Aurore Snow. Her part is a more elegant rehashing of the same role Joan Collins played in Richard Fleischer’s 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. Based on a true story, The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing concerns the plight of an ambitious young woman who falls for an older architect (famed Stanford White, then played by Ray Millard). After the architect leaves her (for his wife and children no less) she’s swept away by a pathologically jealous heir with money and wits to spare. The heir husband ruins her life of course, but we all saw that coming. The plotline of Chabrol’s Girl Cut in Two runs similar narrative paths but with a finesse that’s seemingly devoid of the distaste of scandal. Nothing is salacious here. The humanism of Chabrol’s rendering belies kitsch, spectacle or farce. (Did I mention The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing was pre-Dynasty Joan Collins?)

Chabrol’s interest in this story wasn’t addressed in our brief chat in the Kabuki Kitchen/Press Lounge on Sunday. “Chabrol does not give much direction. He said one thing. He told me, pretend you are Tinkerbell surrounded by Pirates.” This sounds like reasonable advice, as the men in the film are somewhat predatory.

Following that Chabrol told Sagnier “if you want any information, you must sit with me at lunch everyday.” Funny, don’t I recall Tinkerbell having to sneak into strange places to eavesdrop?

“Chabrol is a part of history. Sitting with him everyday is not just about being directed; it’s also like opening a history [of] cinema book. He’s known everywhere and was friends with all the greatest. He shares his passion with so much humor and spirit it was a big honor to work with him.”

Sagnier’s character is ethereal in ways. She’s delicate and slight, naïve but capable of small wisdoms, she suffers undue tragedy in the interest of living a fuller life. Sagnier’s Gabrielle Snow unequivocally (and literally) lights up the rooms she enters. And yet, her lover leaves her; she squeezes her way into a marriage with an unstable playboy and finds herself lost, more so than when we found her. I ask Sagnier, in light of her part, her nymphet quality and the ultimate conclusion of the film, if maybe growing up has something to do with being torn apart.

“Yes. That’s why I’m arrest with Tinkerbell’s character, which hasn’t grown up, actually. She thinks she’s big but actually she isn’t. When I started to read the pages [script for Girl Cut in Two] I thought it was like To Die For. Then I found out Gabrielle isn’t at all that ambitious. Her only ambition is to have a great life, to collect emotion and that’s all she’s in need of. She’s treated very badly and she’s much more naïve than she thinks and that’s her tragedy.”