In lieu of working with the late Master of Suspense, French actress Ludivine Sagnier is happy to settle for collaborating with a living Claude Chabrol.
By Pam Grady, FilmStew.com
French actress Ludivine Sagnier, who made her screen debut at age 10 in Les Maris, les Femmes, les Amants and is best known stateside for Swimming Pool, her third collaboration with Francois Ozon, is well aware of how different her career might have been had she been born in 1929 instead of 1979.
"Joseph Mankiewicz, Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock... They all liked blondes!" Sagnier exclaims during a recent interview with FilmStew with regards to her quixotic wish list. "I would have loved to have worked with any one of them."
That celestial dream team may be out of her reach, but Sagnier comes close with A Girl Cut In Two, the Claude Chabrol black comedy that opens in August. One of the fathers of the French New Wave and the director of such movies as La femme Infidèle, Le Boucher and La Ceremonie, Chabrol also penned (with Eric Rohmer) an early study of the Master of Suspense's oeuvre in 1957 and wrote about him in the pages of Les Cahiers du Cinema.
When Chabrol hired Sagnier to play Gabrielle Deneige, the perky, ambitious weather girl caught up in a love triangle with middle-aged writer Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand) and unstable rich kid Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), she had recently wrapped Christophe Honore's Love Songs, a romantic musical homage to the New Wave. So it seemed entirely organic to the have the opportunity to work with one of the masters of the movement.
"It was amazing, because actually I suddenly felt like I was printing my name in the history books," Sagnier enthuses. "Chabrol is such a monument in France."
"Not only working with him, but talking with him was amazing, because he's been through such a page of cinema history," she adds. "He would talk to me about Hitchcock, saying things like, 'So Alfred asked me if I wanted to show one of the sequences of his movies…' Something that is far away in history was suddenly next door. So it was a very privileged moment to share all those stories with him."
Sagnier had auditioned for Chabrol before, but never gotten a call back and had decided that he would probably never hire her. "I didn't have a high society profile," she recalls thinking. "I thought I wasn't bourgeois enough to work with him."
But then, the character of Gabrielle is not bourgeois and neither is Tinker Bell, the role that convinced the auteur that Sagnier was the perfect Gabrielle, a young woman who - for all her surface sophistication - is still the innocent whose eyes are opened by these two very different men. "What is she really aiming for in life?" Sagnier muses. "I think she's at a stage in her life when she's able to jump into passion where emotion is more important than anything."
Though set in present day France, A Girl Cut in Two's story takes for its inspiration the same true crime tale that propelled Ragtime, the turn-of-the-20th century love triangle between chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, dissolute millionaire Harry K. Thaw and architect Stanford White that ended with Thaw's murder of White. But Chabrol did not encourage Sagnier to research the story or do any other kind of preparation for her role.
"Chabrol is a very mysterious guy," she suggests. "He didn't want me to refer to anything. I thought I would get some details watching Gus Van Sant's To Die For, because she's a weather girl, but I quickly found out that Gabrielle is much more pure than the character Nicole Kidman plays, who is a war machine. Gabrielle is perceived as somebody who is very ambitious, but she is not carnivorous."
On set, Chabrol's direction was just as reticent, if also succinct. "He said, 'You have been Tinker Bell! You know what it's like to be radiant. You know what it's like to fight with old pirates, so you know enough. Do your job,'" Sagnier recalls.
So far, the now 28-year-old Sagnier has amassed three Cesar Award nominations – one for Most Promising Newcomer (8 Women) and two for Best Supporting Actress (Swimming Pool and Claude Miller's The Secret, coming to theaters in September, in which she plays a Jewish mother in occupied France during World War II). She recently wrapped a starring role opposite Vincent Cassel in the two-part gangster saga Death Instinct and Public Enemy Number 1. Directed by Assault on Precinct 13's, Jean-Francois Richet, the films are a rare foray into mainstream action for Sagnier.
"Wow! That was huge!" Sagnier exclaims. "If I have an image in France, it's the image of an actress who only works with very brainy directors and only does serious movies and who spits on the commercial movies."
"I'm usually hired to be the shiny blond, mischievous young woman," she adds. "That's kind of flattering, but I think experience is about variety. I just want to be proud of my resume."
At the moment, Sagnier is taking a break from cinema while she joins the legions of French performers who have crossed over into music by way of her first pop album. But on this sunny afternoon in San Francisco, her mind is all about the movies. The day before she, actor Andy Gillet (the star of Eric Rohmer's The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) and director Mia Hansen-Love (All Is Forgiven) hit the road on a sightseeing tour of the Bay Area, a trip that put her in mind of a certain storied director on her wish list.
"Being in San Francisco makes me want to watch a lot of movies again," she avers. "We were quoting Alfred Hitchcock all day long in the car, Vertigo and also Suspicion and The 39 Steps. All of Hitchcock's movies were flying out of our imagination. We want to come back and do a special road trip only about Alfred Hitchcock movies. I want to see everything!"
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