François Ozon's 8 Femmes (8 Women, 2002) brings together eight of France's best-known actresses for an Agatha Christie-like murder mystery set in a luxurious country mansion: Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Virginie Ledoyen, Firmine Richard, Ludivine Sagnier and Isabelle Huppert. At its release the film was widely seen as a tribute to these actresses, and their participation secured the film a strong commercial success in France and abroad. However, when asked about the casting and the homage that it paid to the women involved, Catherine Deneuve answered: ‘I am not sure Ozon likes women, but he likes actresses.’ This slightly cryptic answer seems to express a certain ambivalence about participating in 8 Femmes, an impression further strengthened when Deneuve goes on to characterise Ozon as ‘a charming boy, but first of all a hard worker. A boy scout who controls everything’.

If I begin by quoting these statements (which did not prevent Deneuve and Ozon from collaborating again on Ozon's similarly successful Potiche [2010]), it is not to speculate about the relation between actress and director. Rather, it is because the pages that follow give one possible reading of why an actress – any actress – might feel conflicted about 8 Femmes. However, they also aim to show that such reticence in no way marks the performance of Isabelle Huppert. The argument will advance through three main stages: the first part will focus on the film's relation to the genre of the melodrama. With this comes a temptation to concentrate on psychological or intersubjective relations. However, looking at Huppert's performance in one of the film's key scenes, it will be argued that such an approach is partly undercut by an almost mechanical aesthetic that brings the women closer to puppets. A final part then considers the relation between the melodramatic and the machinic, before concluding that Huppert's performance is at once non-psychological, nonhumanist, and communicative of an exhilarating confidence in the world's ability to make sense.

8 FEMMES AND THE MELODRAMA

One way into 8 Femmes and the performance of Huppert goes through Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the genre of the melodrama. This story is well-known: Sirk took a low-status genre (the ‘women's weepie’), further enhanced the stylisation and anti-naturalism, and loaded the genre with politically poignant material.