I admit I didn't think much of the news last month that French film icon Isabelle Huppert would make a guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU. Leslie Caron and Jeanne Moreau had famously (and with dignity) preceded her on the series, and really, when you've won a César Award, a BAFTA Award and two Cannes Film Festival prizes for Best Actress, what else is left career-wise but to join NBC's procedural institution for a night? Right? Right. And then I watched the episode.
It's not like Huppert had the show to herself or anything: Sharon Stone's own ongoing guest arc as assistant D.A. Jo Marlowe was nearing its own zenith as well. And when Huppert's "French and mentally unbalanced" Sophie was accused of kidnapping her 8-year-old son in a plot to flee to China, you couldn't help but anticipate a hardcore showdown between the two actresses. Viewers kind of got it, but as the episode spun more and more wildly out of control -- [SPOILER ALERT] the real abductor drives off a bridge, killing himself and the child -- SVU was no longer simply Wednesday night's ham-fisted bastion of deduction, intuition and catharsis. It was out-of-this-world melodrama.
Seriously, I cannot overstate the freakazoid batshit texture of what happened. Mostly I just need to know: Did you see what I saw? Especially at the end:
· Did Sophie really shoot Melinda Warner when her husband ducked?
· Did Stabler really crawl through an airduct to break up the Marlowe/Sophie stand-off?
· Did Marlowe really attempt to talk Sophie off the ledge by recounting her own double mastectomy that cost her her lover?
· Did the pistol-wielding Huppert really keep a straight face while delivering lines like "You can tell God -- in person!" to the husband who tearfully confessed to the fatally botched kidnapping?
· Did Marlowe really offer the boy's corpse to Sophie, like a peace offering, entreating, "Your son needs you!"
· Did I really see Michael Haneke's favorite devastated heroine cradling and singing a French lullaby to her dead kid on a morgue floor?
Moreover, was this all one big joke from the James Franco school of ironic performance art? I'm really asking, folks. Help! Let's talk this one through.