Some filmmakers, like Chaplin and Kubrick, determined that they should release a film only every few years, to make it more like an event to be anticipated. Other filmmakers work faster and harder in an effort not to be forgotten, like Spike Lee or Woody Allen. It's difficult to determine which method is more effective, but it seems like if a filmmaker turns in over fifty films of mostly high quality, their work is eventually taken for granted. Everyone loves Hitchcock now, but in 1976 when his final film opened, he must have seemed like a relic compared to Rocky and Taxi Driver. That's how I imagine Claude Chabrol today. Now 77, he releases a movie a year, more or less, and passed the fifty-film marker some time ago. Unlike his French New Wave colleagues, he didn't make a single masterpiece in his youth, and so has nothing to live up to. Rather, he's consistently reliable and skillful, and it's difficult to judge any one of his films up against another. Look through reviews of his most recent films, and for each one you'll find at least one person claiming it's his best film in years.

And so comes A Girl Cut in Two, which recently screened at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. I loved it. It's another superbly-made, highly enjoyable Chabrol film, but you probably won't see it on any top ten lists, nor will Chabrol be collecting any awards for it. I think "consistent" is a bad word among film people; we're more easily impressed by change and diversity, or by the newest, latest thing. Actors like John Wayne were routinely overlooked in favor of actors like Marlon Brando, though Brando could never in a million years have pulled off what John Wayne accomplished in The Searchers. Brando could do lots of things, but John Wayne was the best at being John Wayne. That's my standard rant, and that's how I feel about Chabrol. Now, onto the new film:

I have to admit that I once turned off a Christophe Honoré film (Ma Mère) long before it ended, and I have been skeptical of his work ever since. But I do have a bit of a thing for musicals, especially those diverting from what we're used to, and I therefore went into the filmmaker's latest, an unconventional musical titled Love Songs (literally translated from the French Les Chansons d'Amour), with modestly open arms. Plus, I realize that as a critic I need not see every film made by every director (I have not seen Dans Paris, Honoré's film between Ma Mère and Love Songs, for instance), but I need to at least give some well-regarded filmmakers a second chance.

Unfortunately, Love Songs didn't really do it for me, either. As I said, it is a musical, and not in the big and lavish Hollywood sense. Yet not really in the all-singing sense of Jacques Demy's films, either, despite the many comparisons being made between Love Songs and Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Sure, Honoré's film features songs sung in a similarly recitative style, and yes, there is the referential connection of Love Songs co-starring Chiara Mastroianni and Cherbourg starring her mother, Catherine Deneuve. But the dialogue in Love Songs is primarily spoken non-musically, and the film would actually have worked, and been better off, in my opinion, if it didn't feature any of its 14 songs at all.

Laurent Tirard's Molière belongs to the subgenre of fictionalized biopics, which is considerably better than belonging to the traditional biopic genre, now a classification that denotes little more than phony, moldy clichés. Taking its cue from Shakespeare in Love, Tirard's film uses the titular French playwright's life as a jumping-off point for a fanciful tale of romance, duplicity, and acting, Acting, ACTING, imagining the adventure had by the 22-year-old Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Molière (The Beat That My Heart Skipped's Romain Duris), during a period of months in 1644 when he mysteriously vanished. It's speculation of the playful sort, as screenwriters Tirard and Grégoire Vigneron cook up a wild saga to serve as the eventual inspiration for the writer's Tartuffe and The Bourgeois Gentleman, both of which are born from his unlikely stay at the opulent estate of arrogant fat cat Monsieur Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), where he finds himself in the middle of various romantic entanglements. Ruses, double-crosses, and covert kisses ensue, all while Tirard casts his legendary protagonist as a kindred spirit of Preston Sturges' Sullivan, convinced that comedy - his natural calling - is merely the ugly, inferior stepchild to tragedy.

It's a belief anyone with passing knowledge of Molière's work knows will inevitably be torn asunder, and one that's firmly opposed by Molière itself, which fervently embraces the author's brand of frothy farce tinged with melancholy. After a brief framing intro (set in 1658) in which Molière and his troupe return to Paris after a 13-year tour of the countryside, the film flashes back to the artist's early days when he was struggling to make ends meet as a two-bit performer. Those lean times come to an end after an accidental bit of Chaplin-esque stage buffoonery gets him hired by Jourdain, who wants acting lessons so that he might perform a ridiculously bad, self-penned one-act play (about Greek mythology) for the gorgeous marquise Celimene (Ludivine Sagnier). This must all be done in secret, however, since Jourdain is married to the sharp-eyed Elmire (Laura Morante), a beauty with whom Molière - posing as a priest named Tartuffe who's been commissioned to tutor the younger Jourdain daughter - soon comes to find himself enraptured, and with whom he begins a clandestine affair that proves one of many tricky situations the young playwright is charged with resolving.