Film Review: 8 Women (Huit Femmes, 2002)

The adage that exceptional ingredients do not guarantee a culinary masterpiece finds a stark cinematic parallel in François Ozon’s 2002 8 Women. On paper, this project was a golden ticket to the pantheon of French cinema: a directorial vision from Ozon, coupled with a cast boasting the most formidable constellation of French screen goddesses in living memory. Yet, despite mild critical approval and solid box-office returns, the film curdles into precisely the kind of insubstantial confection it superficially critiques—a glittering, forgettable trifle that evaporates from the memory almost as quickly as its final, funereal musical number fades.

Ozon’s journey to this impasse began with an abandoned ambition. Initially, he and co-writer Marina de Van sought to remake George Cukor’s razor-sharp 1939 Hollywood satire The Women, a film celebrated for its all-female ensemble dissecting societal hypocrisy. Thwarted by rights issues, they pivoted to Robert Thomas’s obscure 1958 stage play Huit Femmes—itself a modest, low-budget thriller adaptation (The Night of the Suspects, 1960) scarcely remembered beyond niche cinephile circles. This serendipitous shift dictated the film’s DNA: a claustrophobic, snowbound whodunnit set in a late-1950s bourgeois French country house. The narrative ignites when Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen), arriving for Christmas, discovers her father Marcel (Dominique Lemercier) stabbed in the back. With dead phone lines, a car that won't start, and impassable snowdrifts, eight women are trapped: Suzon’s wheelchair-bound grandmother Mamy (Danielle Darrieux, radiating pre-war gravitas); her icily glamorous mother Gaby (Catherine Deneuve, the epitome of controlled elegance); the neurotic Aunt Augustine (Isabelle Huppert, vibrating with suppressed hysteria); Suzon’s younger sister Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier, a wide-eyed crime-fiction obsessive); the stern black housekeeper Chanel (Firmine Richard); the demure maid Louise (Emmanuelle Béart); and Marcel’s estranged, flamboyant sister Pierrette (Fanny Ardant), who arrives unbidden, claiming a mysterious caller summoned her.

Ozon, however, refused to deliver a straight thriller. He injected Thomas’s Agatha Christie-esque mystery—a blend of farcical black comedy and suspense—with an unexpected twist: full-blown musical interludes. This audacious genre hybrid, unprecedented in Ozon’s filmography, aimed for a kaleidoscopic homage. The film’s initial allure, both critically and commercially, stemmed almost entirely from its casting coup. Ozon assembled a living history of French cinema: Darrieux, a star since the 1930s; Deneuve, Huppert, and Ardant, 1960s and 1970s icons; Béart and Ledoyen, their 1980s and 1990s successors; and Sagnier, the fresh-faced hope of the new millennium. It was a summit meeting of Gallic screen royalty, each embodying a different era of cinematic femininity. Visually, Ozon channelled Douglas Sirk’s lush, technicolour melodramas—think All That Heaven Allows—with saturated hues, deliberately artificial sets, and costumes so meticulously period that the film felt less like a narrative and more like a museum diorama of 1950s bourgeois excess.

Yet, this meticulously curated aesthetic quickly becomes the film’s Achilles’ heel. The overt theatricality, initially charming, rapidly erodes any semblance of narrative immersion. Characters declaim lines with stagey precision; motivations shift like cardboard scenery; the plot mechanics feel less like organic mystery and more like a director moving chess pieces. The central murder investigation, rather than driving tension, serves merely as a flimsy scaffold for the gradual, almost clinical, dissection of each woman’s darkest secrets: illicit pregnancies, infidelities, repressed lesbian desires, and emotional cruelty. The cumulative effect is profoundly alienating. Instead of empathy, the revelations breed distaste. Gaby’s icy disdain, Augustine’s hysterical fragility, Pierrette’s manipulative theatrics—all rendered without psychological depth—coalesce into a portrait of femininity so uniformly damaged and unsympathetic it borders on misogyny. A prime example is the catfight between Gaby and Pierrette, a scene dripping with campy violence. It resonates as a meta-commentary on the real-life history of Deneuve and Ardant—once romantic partners and muses to François Truffaut. What could have been a nuanced exploration of jealousy instead devolves into a petty, almost cartoonish brawl, reducing complex actresses to squabbling divas.

The genre fusion proves catastrophically unstable. As a murder mystery, 8 Women fails utterly: the solution, when it arrives, feels arbitrary, unearned, and tonally dissonant—a dark twist that clashes violently with the film’s preceding whimsy. As a comedy, its farcical elements land with leaden thuds, the humour either too arch or too broad to land. Most damningly, as a musical, it is a resounding flop. The songs ack memorability or emotional resonance. Early numbers are chirpy, insubstantial ditties, while the final, dirge-like ensemble piece strikes a jarringly sombre note that feels utterly disconnected from the preceding frivolity. The stellar cast sings competently, but the material gives them nothing to work with; their vocal talents are wasted on tunes that vanish from the mind as soon as they end.

There are, admittedly, flickers of life. Sagnier, as the wide-eyed Catherine, injects a much-needed burst of youthful energy and vulnerability, her performance a refreshing contrast to the studied grandeur of her elders. The production design remains impeccable throughout—a feast for the eyes, if not the soul. Yet, these bright spots only highlight the film’s fundamental emptiness. 8 Women is a film obsessed with surfaces: the sheen of satin gowns, the gloss of lacquered furniture, the perfect enunciation of its dialogue. But beneath this dazzling veneer lies a vacuum. The characters’ traumas feel like plot devices, not human experiences; the mystery is a MacGuffin; the musical numbers, decorative interruptions. It’s a film that mistakes theatrical artifice for depth and stylistic pastiche for originality.

Ultimately, 8 Women feels less like a story crafted for an audience and more like a private indulgence for its creators—a vanity project where Ozon’s love for cinema history overwhelms his storytelling discipline. It’s a film that likely brought far more joy to those assembling its exquisite ingredients than to those consuming the final, undercooked dish.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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