One thing about being a genre master like Alfred Hitchcock or Woody Allen-and Claude Chabrol has much in common with both of them-is that there's no running out of films. People have been saying Chabrol is “at the top of his game” for so many years we're beginning to suspect it's not a game after all but serious, wicked sport. A Girl Cut in Two has a contemporary setting (almost all his films do) but a period mood; we can feel the ghost of Stendhal in the entrenched class warfare at play as Chabrol moves his little toy soldiers around an exquisite social architecture. François Berléand stars as a jaded novelist and too-happily married ladies' man whose latest conquest is poor but honest TV weathergirl Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier). At once naïve and unstoppable, Gabrielle doesn't need to be convinced to enter into a sordid May-September relationship with a celebrated member of the intelligentsia. However, tugging at her other arm with the weight of the entire haute bourgeoisie is young Paul (Benoît Magimel), the cute but dangerously schizophrenic scion of a Lyon pharmaceutical magnate. What's a girl to do? Chabrol solves the problem in his usual methodical way, ending with a set piece worthy of Guy Maddin. Appropriately, the story takes as its starting point a famous Gilded Age crime of passion, the murder of Madison Square Garden architect and notorious womanizer Stanford White.