Working from his and Cécile Maistre’s fine, twisting, elusive script, Claude Chabrol made one of his most teasingly ambiguous films: La fille coupée en deux, both a heartrending feminist fable and quite cruel black comedy that concludes with a sardonic, agonizing dash of Max Ophuls’s Lola Mont ès (1955): the fated stage-bound finish that echoes […]