8 Femmes

What attracted me first to rent this movie was the star-studded cast, which includes some of the most known French actresses like Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart and Isabelle Huppert. But the genre of the movie took me by total surprise. Yes, I knew it was supposed to be a murder mystery. But nothing prepared me for the scenes in the movie that resemble a musical. It was a delight to see these super stars go into rather naïve sequences of dances and songs (sung in their own voices). There were even bigger surprises--scenes of blatant and latent lesbianism that are meant to shock the audience (bear in mind that the movie is set in the late 1950s!). The story succeeded in holding the suspense to the last moment, and the cause to the death of the man in the house is far from what the story would lead you to guess. If the movie's genre is a bit hard to pinpoint, it's because it is experimental. I've read a French review trashing the movie, saying that everything from the movie set to the women's costumes seems fakely beautiful and the eight women are puppets of the director François Ozon. But I would rather view the movie as a play performed on theater. The exaggerations of movements can then be better understood.