If you’ve never seen a Claude Chabrol movie, you’re missing out. If you’ve heard he’s the French Hitchcock, you’re not getting even half the picture. And if you didn’t realize his 1995 movie, La Cérémonie, is one of the most profound statements on class warfare, mental illness and violence, go see it now. It’s not only the best movie I saw in 1995, it contains the best performance of the year by anyone I saw, male or female, in Isabelle Huppert as a cold, angry and morally stilted sociopath who unwittingly creates the means of her own demise.
The story concerns a wealthy family hiring on a new live in maid, Sophie, played with a perfect sense of vacant creepiness by Sandrine Bonnaire. There’s something wrong with Sophie and it’s evident the first moment you see her. She listens as her new boss explains her job but it’s plain to see she’s not present. As soon as she’s alone, she flips on the television in her room and intently stares at it. Not watches it, she stares at it. She stares at it as if the images are entering into her eyes but nothing is processing in her brain. It’s our first real glimpse of her, and it’s disquieting to say the least.
The family that has hired her, the Lelievres, are a wealthy, powerful and respected family but kind and generous and the mother, Catherine (Jacqueline Bissett), is more than friendly and helpful towards Sophie. She needs help from Sophie since she works at an art gallery but Sophie has issues that, for whatever reason, are not immediately visible to Catherine. Sophie nods and stares when told to do certain things but then doesn’t do them. She’s hiding many things about herself, including being illiterate. Eventually, through a mix up with the post office, she comes into contact with Jeanne (Huppert), who works there, and begins a relationship with her, one that Jeanne completely dominates.
Jeanne is angry, very angry. Her anger is vague and broadly directed towards anyone Jeanne feels has an advantage over her. They may or may not, but if Jeanne feels they do, it’s a sure thing she also feels they came upon that advantage unfairly. The Lelievres, for instance, receive the brunt of her wrath (she sabotages their mail, regularly) simply because, it would seem,they are rich and successful. Catherine was more successful in life than Jeanne, for which Jeanne feels slighted. They are decent people who treat others well and yet all Jeanne can see is selfish, arrogant rich people. What she doesn’t see, ever, is herself.
In one particularly chilling scene, Jeanne describes how she casually flung her crying baby against a burning stove and when the baby died, they tried to prove she murdered the baby on purpose. She shows not a shred of remorse for her lost child, she is simply proud that she was never held accountable. Sophie has her own murderous secrets and perhaps she’s hiding more than even Jeanne suspects. All of this leads to a conclusion that, like many Chabrol movies, is shocking and horrifying and one in which no one comes out a winner.
Claude Chabrol was one of the finest members of the French New Wave but doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Perhaps his movies are too dark. Perhaps they say too many things that people don’t want to hear. Perhaps the humor and its perverse nature, sits wrong with audiences. Whatever the reason, his films never enjoyed the international success of his more celebrated brothers-in-arms, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. In La Cérémonie, Chabrol does something most filmmakers wouldn’t have done by making the rich family the sympathetic characters. He does something else too: He gives us characters who can connect to each other, deeply and profoundly, without ever connecting on any kind of emotional level. The relationship between Sophie and Jeanne is brilliantly realized if only because it feels completely genuine and rich while at the same moment feeling completely shallow and hollow. When someone like Catherine tries to connect to Sophie on a more personal level, she resists, but when it is Jeanne, using Sophie as a sounding board for her anger and frustration, she finds an immediate comrade.
La Cérémonie works because the commentary on class attitudes isn’t so much about the classes being different or even about entitlement but about envy and rage. It works because it shows how jealousy and misplaced anger can create an unreality that propels forward everything a person does until tragedy is the only option left. And it works because Isabelle Huppert is simply commanding in a terrifying performance as Jeanne. When the movie reaches its climax, it all feels as perfectly inevitable as it is terrible. And maybe that’s the final statement of the movie: Even if we can all see it coming that doesn’t mean we can do a damn thing about it.
Greg Ferrara