Probably one of the strangest things to be put in film stock in the last years, this is certainly the grand masterpiece of Ozon so far. Putting together what can be arguably the best cast in French film history, it is a delight to see the director use Huppert, Ardant and Deneuve, amongst other, as puppets. Scene after scene he delights in the kitsch freakness and fake-ness of it all, emphasizing a technicolor theatresque 70s TV-movie style… the characters are identified by colours as in a Clue board game, and given stronly stereotypical characteristics, strange lines and slapstic comedy moments… yet beneath all the fun, the theatre and the comedy, he manages to convey, darkness, melancholy and an extreme sense of loneliness in this group of women without a man. Supreme amongst them is Huppert’s performance, where Ozon manages to direct her to be, at the same time, utterly fake and archetypical, yet stunningly real and three-dimensional. It is a pity that few people seem to get over the over-fakeness of it all, and not understand that, like in Von-Trier’s Dogville, the sense of Brechtian detachment is the point of it all. And that’s what is simply masterful of this piece… how, despite pushing the audience away, waking them up from the illusion with raunchy (yet lovely) songs, strange scenes and easy jokes, in the end the characters become completely real in their strange, strange world.