By Jeffrey M. Anderson
That blond firecracker Ludivine Sagnier, 28, turned up at the festival to accompany her new film A Girl Cut in Two, directed by the French new wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol, and she was gracious enough to sit down with me for a chat. Sagnier is happy to talk about her character Gabrielle Deneige (or “Gabrielle Snow” in the English subtitles), a television weather girl who becomes torn between two men, an older, married author and a younger, rich, spoiled brat. But she’s tickled to tell stories about her legendary director.
Ludivine Savignier times two.
“It was amazing,” she says. “I thought I would never work with him because I didn’t have that high society profile. I wasn’t bourgeoisie enough to work with him. I actually felt like I was suddenly printing my name in the history books. Chabrol is such a monument in France. Not even working with him, but only talking with him was amazing. He would talk to me about Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Oh Alfred asked me if I wanted to shoot a sequence in this movie.’ Suddenly he’s speaking about something that’s far away, that belongs to history, but it’s next door. Those were privileged moments to be able to share all those stories with him.”