On Melinda's birthday, people assemble for a party for the 17 year old girl in Claude Chabrol's 1995 La Ceremonie. The party-goers are bourgeois French living in a provincial city. A silent and impassive maid named Sophie has made hors d'ouevres and pours glasses of wine for the guests. One of them, by appearances a High School teacher, recites an aphorism that seems misplaced: he quotes Nietzsche to the effect that the most loathsome thing about people who regard themselves as good is not their secret sins and failings, implying, I think, that it is the pretense of goodness that inspires loathing. The quotation seems inexact and pretentious, in effect, a non sequitur. But the reference to Nietzsche flags a key theme in La Ceremonie: this is Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment, that is, the hatred that slaves bear for their masters -- the lambs, Nietzsche says, abhor birds of prey and define them as evil (and, by extension, elevate their own docile qualities of fearful gentleness to a virtue.) La Ceremonie is a savage study in ressentiment; it's both alarming and uncompromising, seemingly artless but, in fact, a carefully designed movie more akin to a horror film than social satire or a crime movie.
A retired model who is now running an art gallery, Catherine Lantier (Jaqueline Bisset) interviews a curiously disengaged and reticent young woman for the position of domestic maid at her home in the country. Catherine is kind, generous, and casually, if subtly, condescending. Sophie take the position and moves to the family's opulent country home. Sophie is impassive and inexpressive; she seems impossibly stoic and silent. As it turns out, she is completely illiterate and carefully concealing this fact from her employers. The Lantier family treat Sophie well, offer to teach her to drive, and buy new glasses for her -- she doesn't need glasses, in fact, but merely uses an assertion that she has poor vision as an excuse for not reading written material proffered to her. She has no family, no history (it seems), and few, if any, pleasures. Her only pastime is watching TV -- the Lantiers have a satellite dish that offers many stations, but Sophie seems content to watch garden-variety soap operas. The local postal clerk, Jeanne, is much more vivid, aggressive, and overtly hostile. She befriends Sophie and spends time at the Lantier place watching TV with her. Jeanne harbors a deep hatred for those who might be construed as socially superior to her -- she particularly despises the Lantiers and, in fact, opens their mail, reads it, and, then, delivers this correspondence that has been obviously opened and, then, carelessly resealed. Jeanne has insinuated herself into the good graces of the local Catholic Church and works weekends sorting clothing donated to the poor, using this activity to denounce wealthy parishioners for their stinginess. In fact, in one alarming scene, Jeanne and Sophie turn the collection of castoff clothing and toys into a sort of carnival of vituperation with respect to the hapless donors. Their misdeeds are reported to the priest who expels them from the clothing drive. (The priest is a poster-child for handwringing and pompously hypocritical piety.) The malign Jeanne fans Sophie's distaste and resentment for the Lantier family. George, the father, is a factory owner and a great music-lover; Catherine Lantier is his second wife (Jeanne says that the first Mrs. Lantier committed suicide). Between the couple, there is a son, Gilles, and daughter, Melinda. Chabrol portrays these people as somewhat dimwitted, but they seem to be reasonably virtuous and not as villainous as Jeanne, the malicious postal clerk, asserts them to be -- she calls Mrs. Lantier a whore, implies that she entertains men sexually in her art gallery, and accuses George of all sorts of perfidy. And, of course, she knows all about the family because she is reading their mail. Ultimately, George forbids Sophie from inviting Jeanne over to their mansion. Jeanne is offended and encourages Sophie to further misdeeds, although, in truth, she doesn't really need much urging to begin to neglect her duties and behave with insolence to the family members. When Sophie learns that Melinda is pregnant she tries to blackmail the teenage girl by threatening to expose her to her father. In fact, George is close to Melinda and sympathetic and the girl immediately complains about Sophie's extortion to him George fires Sophie who, then, goes to Jeanne to plot revenge. The two women decide to go back to the Lantier household and confront George and Catherine about their mistreatment of Sophie. All four family members are watching Mozart's Don Giovanni and, apparently, recording the TV production while the two young women go on a rampage in Sophie's room and, then, trash the master bedroom. George is an avid hunter and the girls decide to threaten the Lantier family members with his loaded shotguns. The consequences, of course, are horrific.
Chabrol has explored this sinister territory before in other crime films and some of themes are well explored in French cinema -- for instance, Henri Clouzot's 1943 Le Corbeau, set in a provincial town involved crimes arising from the distribution of anonymous poison-pen letters in the village (the film is also an Occupation drama). In La Ceremonie, George remarks that Sophie, now known to be illiterate, reads nothing, while Jeanne, the postal clerk, reads everything -- and, therefore, is in a position to act in an extortionate manner with the family. The film seems singularly crude and without guile in its presentation -- the opening shots involving the job interview with Sophie hustling across a sunny over-exposed street to meet with Catherine in a nondescript cafe look like outtakes from someone's home movies. The photography and editing are completely unobtrusive and the movie has the ugly look of a situation comedy. There are several peculiar scenes -- in one very long shot, we hear dialogue dramatizing the family's disenchantment with the mostly mute, and inexpressive, Sophie: the image simply shows us a doorway leading to spiral stair and an empty foyer -- there are no actors visible and the dialogue, seemingly involving several different days and occasions, is spoken by the actors off-screen. The sequence is deliberately inexpressive, dull, and de-dramatized. When Sophie listens on a telephone extension to Melinda's conversation with her boyfriend about her suspicion that she is pregnant, we see some curious flashes of amber light in the dim rooms, fragments of radiance that don't seem to have a natural explanation. Late in the film, when Sophie and Jeanne are approaching the living room with loaded shotguns, we're giving a very ominous point-of-view shot showing the back of Catherine Lantier as she watches the opera on TV. We expect Sophie and Jeanne to enter the room and brandish their guns at the family members, thereby, motivating the sinister perspective on the unsuspecting family members. But, Chabrol makes things even more disquieting by having Catherine walk to the window to look out onto the home's formal garden, a perspective on topiary and gravel urns that seems to rhyme with the stylized imagery on TV in the film production of Don Giovanni. When the young women appear with their shotguns, their entrance is entirely more disconcerting. Curious details enhance the mood of foreboding -- in the kitchen and pantry where the young women are loading the shotguns, there's a big picture of a hunting larder with a dead hare hanging head down and some murdered birds heaped up on the floor.
The film plays a bit like In Cold Blood refracted through Jean Genet's nightmare play, The Maids. Jeanne has apparently murdered her own child in a particularly ghastly away although as she petulantly says: "They couldn't prove a thing about me." She detests the Lantier parents because they support their daughter when the teenager confesses to them that she is pregnant -- "who was there to hold my hand or dry my tears when I needed an abortion?" Jeanne rhetorically asks. Further, it seems that Sophie may have killed her own brother. Sophie is child-like, simple, and inert; it's obvious that the more malicious and aggressive Jeanne is manipulating her to rage and violence. (The byplay is like the emotional interaction between Perry Smith and Dick Hickock in the film In Cold Blood.) But once Sophie is moved to violence, she becomes a monstrous force that can't be controlled. The film is based on a novel by the Mozart of crime fiction, the late Ruth Rendell, made a peer of the realm (the book is called A Judgement set in Stone) and, although the picture is very deliberately paced, it is compelling and, even, frightening. The movie's primary appeal lies in the acting by its two principals, the incommunicative and repressed, Sophie played by Sandrine Bonnaire and wildly aggressive and brutal Jeanne (Isabel Huppert). Both women provide a master-class in acting, particularly in Jeanne's monologue in which she confesses to killing her four-year old daughter, a speech that is particularly fearsome because of the apparent lack of emotion with which it is delivered. Sophie's anguish and rage at not being able to read, the secret sorrow that motivates her violence, is also powerfully realized. The Lantier family members are dull, smug, and pleasant enough -- but the film isn't about them and they play only an incidental role in the drama transpiring between the two young women. The film is very disturbing, but can be recommended as a penetrating study in a certain form of psychopathic folie a deux. (La Ceremonie refers to the formal protocol that precedes an execution by guillotine under French law.)
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