A desperately welcome polar opposite to the atrocious Moulin Rouge, François Ozon's 8 Women is about as much fun as you should be allowed to have in the dark while still maintaining possession of your clothes.  It's pretty easy to cram a bunch of good-looking, super-popular stars into the same film and hope their charisma will overshadow a lack of originality, but Women is the rare example of an ensemble picture that doesn't disappoint when it comes to style and substance.

Set at an isolated French country estate during a Christmas Day in the late '50s, Women quickly establishes itself as a murder-mystery, as family patriarch Marcel (Dominique Lamure) is found in his bedroom with a knife jutting out of his back.  The phone lines have been cut and the gate is completely blocked by snow, leaving the house's eight occupants (both family and servants) as suspects for Marcel's murder.

Oh, I know what you're thinking – Women sounds an awful lot like Robert Altman's Gosford Park.  But the two films are like night and day.  While Gosford featured two dozen characters, most of which were almost indistinguishable and instantly forgettable, Women expertly fleshes out its eight roles in such a way that each will stay with you long after the credits roll.  And it manages to do it all in a fraction of Gosford's running time.

Like any good whodunit, all of Women's characters have a motive to want Marcel dead (and there's no butler to blame, either).  His estranged wife Gaby (Catherine Deneuve, The Musketeer) and sister Pierrette (Fanny Ardant, Elizabeth) squabble over his money and his will, which may or may not have been recently revised to cut one of them out of the inheritance loop.  Or maybe it was the new chambermaid, Louise (Emmanuelle Béart, Mission: Impossible), since she was the one who found his body.  You can never rule out any member of the staff, so count Chanel the maid (Firmine Richard) as a suspect.  Wheelchair-bound Mamy (the legendary Danielle Darrieux, playing Deneuve's mom for the fourth time) seems to be capable of murder, as does her prim, dour daughter Augustine (Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher), who has a lot of pent-up aggression.  And don't discount Marcel's two kids, Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen, The Beach) and Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier, Ozon's Water Drops on Burning Rocks).

Speaking of Burning Rocks, I almost forgot to mention that Women also features eight campily choreographed (by Burning Rocks' Sébastien Charles) song-and-dance numbers that will either make you giggle uncontrollably or roll your eyes heavenward (Women seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it experience).  In between the singing and dancing, accusations fly and each of the characters start to reveal the cards they had previously been holding very tightly to their chests.  As the film progresses, the secrets and admissions get more and more lurid (including infidelity, incest and murder).  Numerous epithets are administered, including, but not limited to: tramp, whore, hussy, witch and sapphist (twice).  And there are a couple of choice catfights thrown in for good measure, too.

A comedic murder-mystery with song-and-dance numbers – quite the departure from Ozon's last offering, the deadly serious critical favorite Under the Sand.  In a way, Women might be his way of blowing off steam between weighty films, sort of like Paul Thomas Anderson and his upcoming romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love, or whatever the hell Steven Soderbergh meant with Full Frontal.  With Women, Ozon spoofs everything from Technicolor musicals to the shooting style of '50s sitcoms to Agatha Christie and mystery-novel junkies.  His cast look like they had an unbelievable time making this movie, and here's hoping that the DVD will feature what I can only imagine will be some incredibly funny outtakes.

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for some sexual content