8 Women (8 Femmes), François Ozon’s tag-team bitch fest, is so clearly a tribute to 1950s-era Technicolor, that there are times when you wonder why he bothered to cast it with human beings at all. But Ozon is not so much fascinated by Technicolor as by Technicolor musicals, so he needs performers, their movements, and their voices, to go with his color schemes. This is a complication that frequently lands him in trouble. In one sequence, for example – a study in black and scarlet for example – he overestimates his ability to turn Fanny Ardant into Cyd Charisse.

     This laboratory approach to humanity sometimes leads one to speculate that Ozon is a visitor from another planet, more comfortable with our colors and structures than with us. Nor would this be the first film from this chilly, detached filmmaker to trigger such thoughts (see Under the Sand). But it is unfair to suspect Ozon of inhumanity. For all the ruthless behavior of the eight title characters, this movie isn’t misogynist or cruel. On the contrary, in a bizarre way, it is empathetic. Underneath a surface that is both clinically controlled and totally camp, Ozon identifies with his characters – somehow anyway. The problem with the movie is that he can’t quite crack the carapace of his own creation and connect the patina with the pathos.

     It didn’t have to be this way. One of the movie’s loveliest adornments could also have been brought its emotional treasures to light, no matter how deeply they were buried. Catherine Deneuve may not have the greatest range of any actress in the world, but she has mastered the art of film acting and the equally profound art of choosing the right role. Here she plays Gaby, a chic middle-aged woman with two teenaged children. Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen), the elder, is just coming home for Christmas vacation from boarding school in London as the movie begins, while silly Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier) is still at home. Danielle Darrieux, whose hands were made unforgettable by Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de…, plays Gaby’s querulous, miserly mother, or Mamy. The character actress Firmine Richard, plays the maternal housekeeper Madame Chanel, whose name is a tip of the hat to the movie’s general sense of chic (and even to the domestics’ nicely fitted uniforms).

     That Deneuve would dominate this group is no surprise. That she continues to hold the center against the remaining cast is a bit more surprising. Isabelle Huppert, simultaneously her generation’s greatest and most eccentric raw talent, plays Gaby’s "old maid sister" (the movie’s designation). Huppert acts as if she were the deranged offspring of Agnes Morehead and Jerry Lewis, devouring the neon-bright Technicolor scenery until it shines out of her eyes like death-ray high beams.

     Emmanuelle Béart plays the maid, Louise, obviously planted in the house by Gaby’s husband for more than cleaning and dusting. Béart is very, very good, as well as being her usual sexy self, and, unlike Huppert, she resists the call of the movie’s ‘50s-style décor and Chanel-style clothes to overact — well, almost. But there is an essential silliness to the character. And, of course, there is Ardant, playing Gaby’s sister-in-law, who is used by Ozon as some massively distracting decorative feature.

     Deneuve brings centeredness to the film simply by refusing to indulge in caricature. She is the wife, the mother, roles that in other situations would be stereotypical but which aren’t here, a hint that Ozon might be up to something serious. The plot, however, will undoubtedly convince English and American audiences that the filmmaker is just being ridiculous. With everyone housebound by a snowstorm, it is discovered that the man of the house, Gaby’s husband Marcel, is dead, a knife plunged into his back. The phone line having been cut, rational Suzon takes it on herself to discover who the killer is. In the middle, of course, of several musical numbers and a great deal of backbiting and bitchery.

     This sounds just like more high camp, plot material well suited to the excessive décor, costumery, and arch insults exchanged by the women. But the French have a tradition of poetic fascination with English country house murder mystery. Lautréamont, a 19th-century poet who died in 1870 at the age of 24, wrote a strange, hallucinatory work called "Les Chants de Maldoror", told from the point of view of a sort of monster. Amid its violent, and erotic, and obscure passages, the poem has an interlude set aside for country house murder parody.

     It is probably no accident that 8 Women, with its monstrous women, suggests "Maldoror". Ozon is a compulsive alluder. His cast is a series of allusions, in a way. The film’s opening shots of flowers are allusions to Technicolor tests. The whole movie is an allusion to Technicolor musicals. The behavior of the women is an allusion to George Cukor’s The Women. "Maldoror" would just be another log on the fire.

     Unfortunately, 8 Women rewards analysis more than it does watching, something that could be said of Under the Sand, too. The more you look through Ozon’s camera, the more its gaze resembles a microscope’s, the intricacy of life broken down into pretty cellular, but ever more abstract, patterns.

     If Ozon had just pulled away from his amoebic sworls, as lovely as they might be, he might have seen Deneuve in her fullness. Not as a movie icon, not as a blond Technicolor item, not as a Chanel clothes horse, but as a quietly self-possessed, very human presence, quite ready to deliver – musically or farcically – one woman’s worth of emotion. And one woman’s worth would have been enough to carry us through.