There’s been a sense of detached, faintly amused skepticism in much of Claude Chabrol’s work in recent years. The prolific, veteran French writer-director hasn’t seemed deeply or sharply engaged with his character’s often fraught situations for some time. He’s been regularly turning out films whose intensity often barely registers on the affect meter. In such films as La Demoisselle D’Honneur and L’Ivresse Du Pouvoir, he’s seemed to observe rather ordinary people involved in rather mundane pursuits who tumble into serious legal and moral conflicts without becoming notably changed or leaving filmgoers with any obvious insights.

In A Girl Cut in Two, Charles St. Denis’ life isn’t really mundane, even if he exudes a certain self-dramatizing jaded quality. St. Denis (Francois Berleand), a successful fiftyish novelist, is ensconced with his attractive, devoted wife in a striking International Style home on the outskirts of Lyon, from which he declines most media overtures. With a new book being published, he condescends to allow a little public exposure, including an interview at a local TV station, where he meets Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a young, pretty, and down-to-earth weather girl.

Mutually smitten—although his impulses are clearly more erotic than empathetic—they begin a brief affair, carried on in his Lyon pied a terre and very private men’s club. At the same time, the committed, guileless Gabrielle is being aggressively pursued by the petulant, nastily narcissistic scion of a wealthy family (Benoit Magimel). Eventually, a tragic triangulation ensues, although it’s hard to detect Chabrol’s interest in his characters’ fates.

It may or may not help to know that his inspiration for all this was the notorious, early-20th-century story of showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt and her shocking entanglement with both prominent New York architect Stanford White and socialite Harry K. Thaw. (Novelist E.L. Doctorow used it in Ragtime and the late Norman Mailer played White in Milos Foreman’s film version.)

What Chabrol imagined he was bringing to his reworking is difficult to discern. His film isn’t quite listless, but it’s hardly incisive or tension-inducing. Chabrol has often been compared to Hitchcock, but this has always been a dubious association. Girl has been worked out with some care, but Chabrol’s visual compositions and chromatic palette are more involving than his narrative.

He has avoided melodrama and vulgar frisson, but too much of the time about all he comes up with by way of recompense is a vaguely arch enervation.

—george sax