A strange film, I was enjoying it, but I was sadly disappointed by the awful ending (still nice visually, but awful story-wise).Someone might consider it a brilliant switch ( :-/ not really) or even a macabre-funny switch, but I couldn’t help seeing it the wrong way :-/ I hate its ending.
STORY: Marcel lives in a home with six women: his wife Gaby (Catherine Deneuve), his mother-in-law (Danielle Darrieux), his daughter Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier), his sister-in-law Augustine (Isabelle Huppert), and two maids: Chanel (Firmine Richard) and Louise (Emmanuelle Béart).
His other daughter Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) comes home from college for the Christmas holidays. He also has a sister, Pierrette (Fanny Ardant), who occasionally asks him money. When Louise enters Marcel’s room to wake him up and sees a knife in his back, the whole thing starts. He’s been murdered! But Louise never heard the dogs barking, so it can’t be a stranger… they should call the police but someone cut the phone line, and it’s impossible for them to get there themselves because there’s too much snow and it’s still snowing.
They are all trapped inside, and this is it: eight women, suspicious of each other, with their secrets that come out one by one . Occasionally there’s a musical moment when they sing and do a little choreography: that’s very strange, but also rather fascinating in a way, and it’s nice that it’s part of the movie, the characters look at it like we do; I kinda thought what’s it got to do with it all? But then they’re nice musical numbers, very colourful and pleasant. My favourite is maybe the first one, before the murder is discovered.
When Louise screams that he’s dead, Catherine runs up to lock the room and take the key to preserve the room for the police, but Gaby wants to see so she goes up with her sister, but then close it again afraid that the murderer might still be there…
One by one they reveal each other’s secrets plus some of their own: Suzon had secretly come the night before to tell her dad that she was pregnant without being married, and he accepted her: her mom doesn’t. Gaby and Marcel had been sleeping in separate rooms for a while now and she told him that same night that she wanted to leave him for his business partner.
Also, it is revealed that Gaby was already pregnant when she married Marcel: her previous boyfriend died and Marcel married her raising Suzon as his own daughter. Well, more or less since later she confesses to Catherine, and only to her, that Marcel is the father of her baby!! I mean, what?? She didn’t seem to know that he wasn’t her real father! and yet she made a baby with him?!?!?? That’s disgusting and terrible! That was really unnecessary :-///
Grandma refused to help him with her money because she’s really greedy: after all he accepted to have both her and Augustine live in his house at his expense!
Pierrette that night asked him money that she then gave to the man she loved: Marcel’s business partner!
Augustine had a fancy for him and Louise was his lover. Chanel was simply in love with Pierrette, nothing to do with him.
I was very pleased with how the film was never boring, and how I was amused and interested in knowing the next secret revelation! It was very enjoyable, but then the last switch came and ruined everything. It was actually a three-part switch: first part wasn’t really a surprise to me: Marcel was not dead, just pretended to be to find out their truths;
that he was not dead was not really a big surprise because nobody had checked if he was dead, they just said he was, watching from a distance. In that situation someone should have checked if he was really dead or maybe still breathing, if there was something they could do :-/
second: Catherine was the accomplice, actually the plan maker. She had been a witness of how the whole family treated him and planned the whole thing; third: after she reveals it all, she takes the key and goes to his room saying that she loves him, that the two of them will go away , far away from them, that she’s the only one that wants him to be happy, but when she enters the room he has a gun in his hand, and while looking at her he shoots himself dead: that was awful and unreasonable and unacceptable.
I hate this ending because he killed himself in front of his sixteen-year-old daughter, right after she had said how much she loved him! Sure, that might not seem the best way to show it, but she was 16!
Besides, why? What was so devastating?? That Gaby wanted to leave him? Sad, yes, but many people get divorced, and it wasn’t out of the blue at all. He knew it, like he knew that Pierrette wanted money from him, that’s not reason for suicide! Yes, he had also money problems, but now that the truths were out, Gaby or Augustine or the girls would have helped him with that! I mean, I understand that it was a crappy situation, and he was in a really bad place, and all that, and sometimes money problems combined with marital problems can lead a person to suicide, many things can lead someone there actually, but I’ll never, ever accept that a father would do it like this; I’d understand it if she had found him already dead, with maybe a suicide note by his side, but not this way: hearing her say that she loves him, waiting for her (his own 16-y-o. daughter) to enter, than have her look straight at him while he raises the gun to his head and pulls the trigger, blowing his head off in front of her eyes! Unacceptable.
That’s what I meant, I was enjoying it, this weird film full of great actresses, full of colour and music, but then they went too far. I don’t know why they did it like that, and why they had to add that Marcel was the father of Suzon’s baby, it was completely unnecessary and frankly quite revolting on her part. It ruined everything, even the final song (grandma sings very well) and I’m never going to watch this thing again. Disgusting.
ITA8 donne e un mistero
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