Claude Chabrol (1995)
An adaptation of the 1977 novel A Judgement in Stone, La Cérémonie appears to be the first piece of cinema based on a Ruth Rendell work to be made by a continental European director. (Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh followed a couple of years later.) Alongside George Baker’s characterisation of Inspector Wexford in the long-running television series, Claude Chabrol’s film is also one of the few screen interpretations of her work that Rendell publicly commended. The screenplay, by Chabrol and Caroline Eliacheff, relocates the story in rural Brittany. It also adjusts the relative size of the main roles.
In Rendell’s novel, the illiterate maid Eunice murders her employers with the help of an accomplice who, as a social misfit, is also a kindred spirit. In La Cérémonie, the Eunice character and the accomplice character – Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) and Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) respectively – are more of a double act. Chabrol’s equalising of the roles and description of the pair’s behaviour behind closed doors combine to give La Cérémonie a faint whiff of Jean Genet’s The Maids. Jeanne is not, however, a domestic servant but the local postmistress and Isabelle Huppert is significantly older than Sandrine Bonnaire – factors that turn Jeanne, rather than Sophie, into the prime mover in their relationship and actions.
The acting is strong and the story told with verve but the film has a flippancy that’s most unlike Ruth Rendell and which makes her admiration for La Cérémonie something of a mystery in itself. Chabrol skewers the entitled complacency of Sophie’s employers, the Lelièvres, but the climactic killing of all four family members doesn’t amount to subversion of the social order. The businessman paterfamilias Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) is such a prat that he wears an evening suit and bow tie in his living room to watch a TV transmission of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and their late-teenage children Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Valentin Merlet). (In fact, Gilles is Catherine’s son and Melinda Georges’s daughter from previous marriages.) The opera music drowns out the noise that Jeanne and Sophie are making in the kitchen. Their intention seems to be to trash a few of the Lelièvres’ possessions rather than the people themselves: when they start mucking around with Georges’s guns in the kitchen, they’re not intending to use them. The first of the homicides – the killing of Georges – is spur-of-the-moment. The remaining three are a matter of consequential action.
According to Wikipedia, Chabrol ‘jokingly called [La Cérémonie] the last Marxist film’ and jokingly is all too right. What comes across more than a political message is the arbitrary nature of key events in the plot. In the first scene, Catherine, who runs an art gallery, meets Sophie in a café to interview her for the maid position. Sophie’s stiff, laconic answers to questions are so disquieting that I was never clear why she got the job. It seemed Catherine must be desperate to get a live-in maid without delay but that didn’t fit with the later revelation that the family hadn’t had one before (and aren’t sure even what to call Sophie). A moderately amusing subplot revolves around Jeanne’s involvement in the local church, and attitude towards the pompous priest (Jean-François Perrier) and his acolyte Mme Lantier (Dominique Frot), whom Jeanne especially reviles. After killing the Lelièvres, Jeanne leaves the family’s mansion ahead of Sophie and is killed by the priest’s car, in which Mme Lantier is a passenger. The driver solemnly informs the police ‘it was fate’. It’s hard to see that this amounts to more than an ironic flourish.
At this distance in time, Isabelle Huppert’s theatricality seems uncharacteristic but her trademark speed and impatience are in evidence and repeatedly deliver. With large, soulful eyes in a gaunt, pale face, Sandrine Bonnaire is a compelling camera subject. She makes Sophie largely affectless – almost android – except in registering shame at her illiteracy. The two leads are strongly complementary. Sophie and Jeanne are given matching pasts. Each was suspected of responsibility for a death – Jeanne her child’s, Sophie her disabled father’s – but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict either. Their backstory naturally sets up expectations but the narrative, entertaining as it is, isn’t going anywhere exciting until the shocking finale.
At one point, Catherine and Gilles watch a film on television – ‘a good one’, she assures him. Someone in the NFT3 audience laughed emphatically when the TV screen images appeared – to tell the rest of us he could identify the movie and that it was one of Chabrol’s. I didn’t recognise the film but I could see Michel Piccoli was in it and knew he’d worked with Chabrol – so that the one-upmanship laughter was confirmatory rather than excluding. I’m not sure whether Chabrol meant this in-joke as a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that his work is part of the same self-satisfied haute bourgeoisie culture as Don Giovanni or whether he was being more thoughtlessly ‘playful’. Whichever, I think the inclusion of the clip (from Red Wedding (1973)) epitomises what I dislike about La Cérémonie.
28 June 2019
