8 Women

8 Women

Finally, the initial Agatha Christie musical has arrived. Within a cottage buried in snow reside eight women: one dead man with a knife in his back and six song and dance numbers. The cast consists of French legends; Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Ledoyen, Firmine Richard and Ludivine Sagnier.

The motion picture cheerfully informs us it is a satire on overproduced Hollywood musicals from its first shot. Branches that should be snapped under their weight by picturesque snow cover trees reveal a lovely cottage where guests are just beginning to arrive as we pan. Eight women have come together to celebrate Christmas with Marcel; Gaby’s (Deneuve) husband, Mamy’s (Darrieux) son in law , Aunt Augustine’s(Huppert) brother-in-law , father of Catherine (Sagnier) and Suzon ( Ledoyen), employer of domestic servants Madame Chanel (Richard)and Louise (Beart), brother of late-arriving Pierrette (Ardant).

“ Monsieur died in his bed with a knife in his back,” they are told. And “the dogs didn’t bark all night.” This information is absorbed by the women while dressed in stunning designer fashions (even the maids are chic) and placed around a large sunny room that looks mostly like a stage set right down to the detail that all the furniture is behind the actresses most of the time; only an occasional brief excursion upstairs keeps us from having the whole movie on this one bright set where nothing looks used or lived with.

This artificiality is so jolly that when the first song begins we aren’t surprised because “8 Women” isn’t serious about murder or plot or anything else except having fun with its cast and I realized I’d been waiting for years for Catherine Deneuve to turn to Isabelle Huppert and say, “I’m beautiful and rich. She’s ugly and poor” and I’d just about given up hope of ever seeing Deneuve and Fanny Ardant rolling around on the floor pulling each other’s hair.

In a cast where everybody has fun, Huppert has more than her share as Augustine; she and her mother (Darrieux) have lived rent-free in Marcel’s cottage with her sister (Deneuve), but that doesn’t inspire Augustine to compromise an inch in her fierce resentment and spinsterish isolation; she stalks around the set like Whistler’s mother, frowning from behind her horn-rims and making disapproval into a lifestyle.

The other characters quickly fall into approved Agatha Christie patterns: young Suzon appoints herself Sherlock Holmes, or possibly Hercule Poirot this time out, and starts nosing around for clues. Sexy Louise is established as Marcel’s mistress. Madame Chanel from French Africa has been with the family for years and lives out back in the guest cottage, where it develops that she often played cards with Pierrette. And Pierrette herself–who arrives late with the kind of entrance that only tall dark forcible Ardant could pull off–has secrets which are as amazing as they are inevitable.

I can’t divulge a bit of the plot. The movie is nothing but plot that, and stylish behavior, and barbed wit, and musical numbers. You sit there grinning like a dope for half the time of “8 Women.” It’s astonishing that François Ozon, who directed this film, also made “Under the Sand” (2001), that melancholy record of a wife (Charlotte Rampling) whose husband disappears, presumably drowned, and who won’t face facts about him being dead. “8 Women,” like many films this year at Toronto, is essentially for movie-lovers. You have to have seen more than your fair share of overdecorated studio musicals.

You have to know who Darrieux and Deneuve and Beart and Huppert and Ardant are; you need to be able to taste this one. It doesn’t hurt if you’ve seen Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” now in its 50th London year with its cast still trapped with the corpse in the isolated cottage: “Do not give away the secret!” exhorts the program. Here too never mind that by now it’s just another twist of the plot’s pepper mill.

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