LA CEREMONIE
[Spoilers]
A film review by vergerus@interlog.com
Copyright 1997 vergerus@interlog.com
***1/2 out of ****
Claude Chabrol's "La Ceremonie" is a return to the bourgeois thriller and to the heights scaled by the director almost thirty years ago, in such films as "Une Femme Infidele" and "Le Boucher." However, "La Ceremonie," which is an adaptation of Ruth Rendell's "A Judgment in Stone," finally transcends its generic trappings to take its place among the most frightening and disturbing of all films.
The narrative concerns a strange, remote young woman named Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), who is hired as a maid by an "haut bourgeois" family, the Lelievres, to care for their provincial mansion. Sophie performs her chores with an admirable efficiency, but she is sullen and withdrawn, and she spends her free time alone, riveted to the television set in her room. We soon learn that she is illiterate and is paranoid about concealing this fact from the Lelievres. In time, Sophie strikes up a friendship with Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), the uninhibited village postmistress, who bears a grudge against the Lelievres and their wealth....
That's basically the story, but in the end it seems far less important than the film's rich accumulation of characterizations and details, which remains vivid in the memory long after the film is over: Sophie and Jeanne's "bonding," in a paroxysm of giggles; the Lelievres garbed in evening dress to watch an opera telecast; the manner in which Melinda, the Lelievres' daughter, returns a borrowed handkerchief to Jeanne; the stricken expression on Sophie's face when her illiteracy may be discovered.
"La Ceremonie" has been presented as a "thriller," and while the film fulfills certain generic expectations, some viewers have expressed dissatisfaction at the film's detached tone, the lack of sympathetic characters, and the alleged "pointlessness" of it all. But, finally, the film is not strictly a genre work, and therefore it's senseless to attempt to impose generic (Hollywood) conventions on it.
Chabrol's cold, even clinical, manner is off-putting to some, but it has always been the essence of his style. In "La Ceremonie," it is precisely his refusal to moralize, and thereby to provide easy answers, which makes the film so resonant as well as ironic. It's not difficult to surmise on which "side" the director stands, in terms of the class opposition presented in the film, but his approach remains remarkably balanced. Chabrol's art is one of observation, and it ensures that we are free to interpret for ourselves.
Our need for a protagonist is not only a Hollywood convention, of course, but one of classical and modern narrative forms. Chabrol scorns this need, and in the two "unsympathetic" lead roles, Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert are superb. Huppert exhibits a much greater vitality than American audiences have come to expect of her, and her Jeanne is a mischievous meddler laced with a truly malevolent edge. Even more impressive is Bonnaire's brave, uncompromising performance as Sophie: both she and Chabrol have the audacity to present a central character who is cold and withdrawn and enigmatic. We are provided several clues as to the possible sources of Sophie's sullen, aloof demeanor, such as her illiteracy and the strong intimation that she has perpetrated a crime. (And if she did indeed commit it, why? Was she abused or oppressed? Is her illiteracy something that was forced upon her?) It is quite deliberate that we never really understand her, because for Chabrol there can be no simple cause-and-effect. The incomprehension and emotional distance that we, as an audience, feel towards Sophie are not only essential to producing the film's underlying sense of tension and discomfort; our alienation from her puts us precisely in the shoes of the Lelievre family, and also makes Sophie's final actions simultaneously more unexpected and more plausible.
What does the film finally mean? Don't expect the Hollywood "we're-going-to-spell-this-out-for-you" approach. Certainly, Chabrol intended "La Ceremonie" as a critique of the French class struggle, but it's also about the breakdown of human relationships and the substitution of mass communications (television); about how one personality emotionally and morally overwhelms another; about the commonplace nature of evil. And in his rather weighty review in "New York," David Denby has said that the film is about "the end of civilization." Given that "la ceremonie" refers to the colloquial French term for "dead man walking," he may just be right.
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