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8 WOMEN
"There is no good reason to see '8 Women,' FranALois
Ozon's sumptuous and rigorous derangement of plausibility, coherence
and proper taste. But who ever went to the movies for good reasons?...'8
Women' is indefensible, cynical, even grotesque; it is also pure--that
is to say innocent and uncorrupted--fun...you find yourself drawn
helplessly into the loopy, nonsensical story with strangely fretful
anticipation...The eight women of '8 Women' submit to the indignities
of slapstick, of maudlin music, of betrayal, shame and brokenheartedness
and then magically return to form, speaking perfect bourgeois prose,
immaculately coifed and attired. They never lose face; with those
faces, how could they?" --
A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"Put simply, it is a cocktail: a hot-hued, postmodern, nieteen-fifties
murder-mystery musical hen party. You may be left with doubts about
Ozon as a director, but one thing is for sure: he'd make a hell
of a bartender...this film is not quite the frozen and brittle comedy
that it appears to be, and, if you can stomach it the first time,
you may experience a baffling wish to see it again--to inspect this
crystalline curiosity form another angle." -- Anthony
Lane, The New Yorker
"The film is pervaded by that kind of campy sensibility that pretends
to adore women but actually despises them. It is in the service
of this misogynistic sensibility that Ozon humiliates some of France's
most treasured actresses...The embarrassingly choreographed, awkwardly
lip-synced song-and-dance sequences that punctuate the half-jokey
melodrama are simply excruciating, with the deadly, self-conscious
vibe of a bad grade-school play. This incompetence may be deliberate,
but it isn't funny or clever." --Jonathan
Foreman, The New York Post
"'8 Women' delivers just what the title promises. FranALois Ozon's
new comedy-thriller-musical-romance boasts as glamorous a cast of
fabulous French actresses as any stargazer could wish for...Ozon
enjoys paying tribute to other directors, and '8 Women' is his half-sincere,
half-teasing homage to vintage thrillers, Hollywood musicals, and
TV soap operas, which also seduce audiences with beautiful faces,
eye-filling outfits, and plot twists where defying credibility is
half the fun." -- David Sterrit,
Christian Science Monitor
"For '8 Women,' the young director FranALois Ozon has congregated
some of the greatest actresses in French cinema--but having gotten
his women, like too many men, he doesn't know what to do with them...The
excuse for this confabulation of chic is a genre pastiche that looks
something like Douglas Sirk and plays out a bit like Agatha Christie...Although
it starts off vaguely amusing, '8 Women' grows progressively sour,
curdled by the filmmakers' bad faith and lack of compassion...if
Ozon has picked up on the excesses of Sirk's style, he has mistaken
the Hollywood auteur's ironic detachment for wholesale cynicism."
-- Manohla Dargis, The Los
Angeles Times
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