BY DANIEL BAIG | NOTE: 8 Women opened September 20^th in Los Angeles and New York City. It will expand on the 27^th.

Picture an Agatha Christie-type situation:

A group of people trapped  snowed in  together in an isolated house in the country, slowly coming to the realization that one of them is a murderer.

Picture it done as a play. One set. Nine characters.

Now picture it as a comedy  slapstick even which deliberately careens into absurd melodrama.

Now also picture its characters periodically breaking out into songs (popular hits from years gone by), a la Moulin Rouge! Dancing, too.

And now, if you recognize the names, picture it also as a tribute both to the Technicolor weepies of Douglas Sirk and to Luce, Loos, and Cukors The Women.

And picture it in French.

With some of the biggest stars (ever) of the French cinema.

Female stars, that is.

If any or all of the above sounds intriguing or fun to you, then rush to go see 8 Women (8 Femmes) when it opens near you. You will enjoy it.

If on the other hand youre thinking Thats not exactly my cup of tea (though if youre thinking that, you quite possibly  probably  arent thinking it in those words), Id still recommend giving it a chance. You just might enjoy it, as something completely different from the kind of movie you always see.

Although there are two shootings and one stabbing, there are no explosions or car chases. (The latter would have been especially difficult, since the action never leaves the house and its yard.)

Though it does feature: a catfight which turn into a passionate lesbian encounter, unexpected and shocking revelation after unexpected and shocking revelation (after unexpected and shocking revelation . . . after unexpected and shocking revelation), and 

the gorgeous enough to induce heart attack Emmanuelle Biart (Mission: Impossible) in  and out of!  a French maids costume. (A cliched outfit justifiable for once, as she actually is playing a maid, in France.)

Plus Virginie Ledoyen, the object of Leos attraction in The Beach, here channeling a bit of the poised innocence of the young Audrey Hepburn.

And the incredible embodiment of sensuality that is actress Fanny Ardant, onetime muse of Francois Truffaut, and perhaps best known to American audiences for her roles as aristocratic great ladies in the period pieces Elizabeth and Ridicule.

Also last years winner of the Best Actress laurels at the Cannes Film Festival for the searing The Piano Teacher [La Pianiste], and the actress who gave, along with Sandrine Bonnaire, two of the most frightening and realistic portrayals of psychopaths ever put on screen, in La Ceremonie (and long ago the woman who spelled trouble for Steve Guttenberg in Curtis Hansons The Bedroom Window), Isabelle Huppert.

Huppert is probably one of the best and most respected film actors working in the world today, in the rarefied company of the likes of Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Sean Penn, and Daniel Day-Lewis. Her performance in 8 Women, as a spinster aunt full of resentment towards and jealousy of everyone and everything, is a comic one, and is a tour de force. Its perfection; gestures, inflection, the way she throws herself into a chair, the anger in the eyes  all dead on. The performance can actually also be seen as a spoofing exaggeration  a self-parody  of characters shes played, especially her stern musical academic in The Piano Teacher.

Also playing members of the trapped group of femmes  at least one whom must also be fatale , seven of them wondering, and one knowing, Who done it  and might do it again? are the African-French actress Firmine Richard, and Ludivine Sagnier, who was also one of the stars of one of 8 Womens writer (with Marina De Van) and director Francois Ozons previous films (which was also, like this latest one, adapted from a play), Water Drops on Burning Rocks. I was shocked to learn, after I saw 8 Women, that Sagnier is actually 23, because she convincingly plays a 15-year-old in the movie.

This leaves two women still. I saved mention of these actresses for last, because the word legendary can be used in conjunction with both of them.

First, theres Catherine Deneuve. Its an overused phrase, but it certainly is apropos here: shes become a legend in her own time. Along with wine, cheese, and the countrys cuisine in general, shes one of Frances most internationally well-known, desired, and loved products. The French think shes pretty great too. She was used as the model for one of the incarnations of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, whose bust is found in every city hall in the country. Although the vast majority of her roles have been in French/French language productions, shes had at least one very memorable American role  as the ageless vampire in The Hunger, who seduced Susan Sarandon and kept David Bowie around as a consort.

And finally  well, Ill get at it in a backwards fashion. The other week I went to see a screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of a print, lent by the government of France, of a film from 1952, Le Plaisir. This movie was directed, and co-written, by Max Oph|ls, a truly legendary filmmaker. Six of his films showed up in the most recent Sight & Sound Best Films of All Time polls. (His legendary status is further enhanced by the fact that his son went on to become an internationally respected filmmaker as well  Marcel Oph|ls, who did The Sorrow and the Pity.)

Le Plaisir is actually a triptych of stories. The central, and longest one, which provides the films title, is about the women of a bordello (plaisir means house of pleasure, i.e. whorehouse) who take a rare day off to travel to the country to attend the first communion of the niece of the brothels madam. (Do you realize in that previous sentence I used four different ways, not including the French word, to refer to an establishment where one finds prostitutes? Would you have thought thered be that many?) Of the cathouse (theres another one!)s denizens, the tallest and most striking, and perhaps the most kind, is Rosa, who makes a profound impression on the father of the little girl. Rosa is played by Danielle Darrieux.

(Le Plasir was one of three films Darrieux starred in that year, one of them in English. The following year she teamed up again with Oph|ls again for The Earrings of Madame, a movie which many consider to be one of the greatest films ever made.)

Fifty (!) years later, Darrieux is one of the stars of 8 Women. The tall, gorgeous young woman has shrunk in stature, and become old. Not surprisingly, she plays the grandmother. But this is no small character part of a smiling granny. On the contrary, Darrieux character is devious, deceptive  and perhaps you shouldnt trust that wheelchair shes in. Plus, in this movie all the roles are pretty much equal in size.

When Darrieux made Le Plaisir, she had already been acting in movies for 21 years. (The first film she did had no spoken dialogue!) So her career, still going strong, has lasted 71 years  and counting.

In some ways 8 Women is about all of these actresses, or at least their screen images, especially those of the triumvirate of Deneuve, Ardant, and Huppert.

Similarly, its also a movie about the movies, without explicitly saying so: in addition to being a loving post-modern take on Sirk films, The Women, etc.  in other words, being about movie history , its about the effects created by lighting, by costuming, and by set decoration.

Each of these aspects of the filmmaking craft are deliberately heightened; theyre meant to be actively paid attention to, which is hardly what is desired for their films by most directors.

The lighting (designed by cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie) starts out incredibly bright, to a degree only partially justified by the fact that the story begins in morning. Its unrealistically bright  and everywhere; there are no shadows. Somehow this helps create a feeling of overt theatricality  in the sense of us not being in the real world, but rather somehow being on a stage with actors performing a play around us.

As the day goes on, and events get disturbing  a murder or two, allegations of infidelity and blackmail, etc.  shadows form and darken. When Fanny Ardant sings a torch song, shes lit by a spotlight, while all around her is black. By the end of the film, when almost all the family secrets have been revealed, evening has set in  the darkness helping, perhaps, some of the characters to manifest behavior springing from the subconscious.

The movie starts outside of the house, panning past a distant landscape of pine trees in snow, over piled up banks of more snow, past a 50s car parked in the driveway, and up and into the house. Except that that landscape is quite clearly a painted backdrop, the snow pretty obviously fake, and the exterior of the house none too real-looking either. This isnt sloppy filmmaking, and its not that they couldnt afford to do any exterior shooting. Outdoor filming isnt as expensive or difficult as it used to be, and in any case, this is a pretty expensive looking film. Instead, this has all been to acknowledge that the events of 8 Women are taking place on a movie set, in a big soundstage, just like the films of the 50s.

The costumes, designed by Pascaline Chavanne, are purposely ostentatious, though not cartoonishly so (well, except perhaps for Bearts aforementioned maids outfit, but that too is by design; it adds to the sense that this is all a stage play ((Agatha Christie meets Claire Booth))). Hupperts severe, angular to the point of sharpness, conservative dress is a representation of her character  and vice-versa; ditto for Deneuves glamorous Hollywood late 40s/early 50s couture outfit. Ardant, the storys woman with a past, is of course dressed in shocking, scandalous red. (Red, as in scarlet, as in scarlet woman; see Jezebel, or Rita Hayworth movies, etc. for numerous Hollywood examples.)

And, as I hinted at earlier, there are many, many other opportunities to play, if youre able to and so inclined, spot the reference  like the sweet and obvious one to Sirks All That Heaven Allows (a film which has its own American cinematic reworking coming very shortly in Todd Haynes Far From Heaven) which occurs in the films thirty seconds or so of action. Even before that, during the start of the opening credits (typescript in a 40s/50s style, of course), Sirk is already summoned up by the very first image of the film, a close-up of the crystal strands of a chandelier, echoing the falling diamonds of the opening credits of Imitation of Life. And the colors, similarly, are Sirk colors. Ditto the lush violins.

But you dont have to know, or worry about, any of this stuff to enjoy 8 Women. It can just be appreciated as a pretty darn funny movie with eight great comic performances.

The only real problem I had with the film is that, for me at least, by the end the musical numbers start to get a little tedious. Im sure Id feel differently if I was French, since all the songs  though sung here by the actresses themselves  are covers of recordings which were hits in France in years gone by. So in France they bring with them their own connotations and history and resonance. Here, however, lacking that knowledge, though the lyrics are translated, like the rest of the dialogue, via subtitles, I still started to feel left out by them, as it were. This is especially so because, as with the lighting, the numbers start out bright and bubble gum, but end up torch and, at the very end, almost dirge-like. The end number seems unnecessarily solemn, to the point of provoking laughter, considering what a silly film  which I mean in a good way  this is.

Grade: A/A-