LUDlViNE SAGNlER
ngenue. starlet and disgracefully young-
looking. Ludivine Sagnier is about to turn
30. In a daulingly high-quality career. she has packed in collaborations with many of the heavyweights of French cinema including Francois ()Ion. Claude Miller and Alain Resnais. Not bad for an actor still in her 20s. Yet. when I meet her in Paris. she is engagingly devoid of movie-star airs.
Pretty and petite. she talks quickly and fluently in linglish. passionate about cinema. yet quick to laugh at herself. ‘I have a feeling I still haven't achieved a lot and that the best is yet to come.’ she says. ‘()f course if you'd said to me at l8 that I would be in all these films. I wouldn't expect a tenth of what has happened. but I've become used to being surprised. because that's what being an actor involves.‘
(lrowing up in a middle-class household in a small town outside Paris. Sagnier began acting at the age of eight as a way of avoiding learning the piano. Within two years she had made her professional screen debut in the long forgotten Les Maris, Les I-emmes. Les Amunts. (ioing on to study at the Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Versailles. she secured parts in l’rancois ()zon's earlier films Water Drops on Burning Roe/ts and 8 Women. But it was her performance as a Provencal wild child with a liberated attitude to nudity in ()zon‘s 2002 Swimming Pool. for which she was heralded by Rolling Stone as ‘the new Brigitte Bardot‘. giving her an international profile.
Now. two years after it was released in France. Sagnier’s second outing with new wave film veteran Claude Chabrol has finally made it across the Channel. In the sly melodrama The Girl Cut in Two. she plays Gabrielle. a TV weathergirl torn between a famous novelist and a suave libertine. Exuding the sprightly effervescence that makes the character so appealing to men. she also manages to bring out Gabrielle‘s naivety.
Unsurprisingly. she wasth little time deliberating about whether to work with Chabrol. ‘He's part of the history of cinema. like Hitchcock. Bergman. Truffaut and Godard. so working with him was like entering this great pantheon of directors.‘ she says. ‘lt‘s the cinema 1 worship. so I said yes immediately.‘
The 78-year-old Chabrol doesn‘t bother with casting sessions. Instead. Sagnier met him in a cafe where she realised her list of questions was redundant. ‘Claude told me about the catering on-set.' she says. ‘He talked about it for an hour. so I knew I would be well-fed.’
Chabrol himself has described The Girl Cut in Two as a ‘chaste film about perversity’. Inspired by a real-life crime of passion in early 20th century America. it takes a peek behind the closed doors of a swingers club. In the most explicit scene. a naked Sagnier crawls along on all fours with a feather between her buttocks. much to her partner’s delight. ‘That was very difficult to play.‘ she says. ‘But it was very useful to really shock the audience. To me it shows the tiny boundary between devotion and submission.’
Highlighting the fairytale dimensions of the story. Sagnier regards Gabrielle as a modern- day Snow White who discoveres her Prince Charming is more like Captain Hook. Revealingly. Chabrol told her she‘d be perfect for the part after he'd seen her performance as the mute fairy Tinker Bell in P] Hogan‘s Peter Pan. ‘You can see the similarities.’ she says.
18 THE LIST 14—28 May 2009
As she prepares to set the silver screen alight once more, Fri to Tom Dawson about Snow White, politics and being a star in th