La Cérémonie [1995]

 Claude Chabrol had impishly quipped that La Cérémonie – one of his greatest accomplishments, and which I’d been craving to revisit ever since I read A Judgement in Stone, the terrific source novel by Ruth Rendell – that it’s a “Marxist film”. This deliciously insidious tour de force work wasn’t just a cutting dissection of class structures, dynamics and conflicts, it literally culminated into a violent class war. He transplanted the novel from the British to the French countryside, retaining the unnerving interplay between a provincial locale’s overly tranquil environs and its sordid undercurrents with sinister possibilities, while replacing the author’s faux-reportage prose with a venomously ironic tone that made this an icily controlled domestic thriller. The malevolent tale is spearheaded with stunning aplomb by two of the most fabulous French actresses – Sandrine Bonnaire, as the taciturn, eerily withdrawn and inscrutable Sophie who’s pathologically ashamed of her illiteracy, and Isabelle Huppert, as the chirpy, eccentric, borderline unhinged and devilishly volatile Jeanne. A ticking bomb is planted the day the wealthy, cultured and deeply snobbish Lelièvres – comprising of the ravishingly beautiful Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset), her quietly arrogant second husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel), his gently condescending college-going daughter Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen), and her gauche adolescent son – hire Sophie as resident maid in their isolated mansion, and the fuse gets lit when the latter ends up befriending Jeanne, an impetuous postmistress who loves prying into people’s secrets and holds a smouldering grudge against the family for their privilege and indifference. Further, the feral pair are subconsciously craving for delayed vendetta against the social order for their disreputable pasts, and their roiling resentments erupt into a shockingly manic climax that Chabrol must’ve especially relished filming.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Crime Thriller/Black Comedy

Language: French

Country: France