La cérémonie: Domestic Distubrances

There’s no question that Chabrol meant to call attention to this cavalier gesture. Huppert is both deliberate and casual, somehow moving slowly and quickly at the same time. It suggests she’ll do what she wants, whenever she wants to. That quality has already attracted Sophie, increasingly alienated by her employers and no longer fully content to spend her downtime plopped in front of the television, soaking in popular culture through visual means. If Jeanne can just start chewing that piece of gum again as if it had never been stuck under her desk, what else is she capable of?

What else are women, especially those unencumbered by marriage and children and class propriety, capable of? It’s the central question of La cérémonie, and because it’s a Chabrol film, the answers are ugly.

Claude Chabrol was part of the French New Wave, his contemporaries (and Cahiers du cinéma colleagues) including Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer. But the nouvelle vague doesn’t entirely encapsulate him. While his early films, beginning with the mirror-imaged Le beau Serge (1958) and Les cousins (1959)—the former about a city boy visiting a country cousin, the latter reversing the situation, both with unnerving results—were more experimental, along the lines of his peers’ work, a dry spell in the mid-1960s propelled Chabrol to churn out spy thrillers in order to pay the bills. But by decade’s end, he had found his voice in supremely crafted psychological suspense, leading him to a string of successes.

Throughout his career, Chabrol took many cues from his early idol, Alfred Hitchcock, but his thrillers and female protagonists, cool as they may be, are far from icy. Rather, they roil with emotion, often stirred up by mundane events that slowly transform into monumental, violent ones. Where Hitchcock famously puts his women on pedestals only to knock them down and break their spirits, Chabrol approaches them with bemusement, curious as to what they may do, which boundaries they may break. As he said in the 1996 interview cited above, ‘‘[Women] live in a world that is still very macho. So to be heroines, they don’t have to do extraordinary things. It’s enough for them to be women to have very real problems.”

What Chabrol is describing is the genre of domestic suspense, largely the domain of mid-twentieth-century women crime writers (though the term is currently used to describe psychological thrillers of the post–Gone Girl age). Many of these writers’ stories center around the terror that can be found among couples and families, within the home, reflecting the individual and societal anxieties of the day about women gaining independence and losing it, and being trapped in conventional lives and yearning for freedom—and fears of outside challenges to the idea of the nuclear family. Where midcentury hard-boiled detective novels (mostly by men) often bathe in romanticism, even sentimentality, domestic suspense has little need for either.

No wonder many of Chabrol’s best films are clearly a part of, even as they take liberties with, the domestic-suspense genre. Les biches (1968) is a gender-flipped version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, exploring female power and seduction. La rupture (1970), adapted from Charlotte Armstrong’s The Balloon Man, artfully examines a woman’s desperate bid to keep custody of her son away from her terrorizing in-laws, even as the pacing stops and starts in ways that throw off the traditional suspense trajectory.

To watch a Chabrol film is to feel your mind bend slowly, slowly, then all at once. Nowhere is this quality more apparent than in La cérémonie. Consider the opening scene, in which Sophie, the seemingly mousy maid, meets her prospective employer, Catherine Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bisset, ravishing as ever, her French melodious) at a diner. They discuss terms. Catherine seems to hold the upper hand. And then, flatly, Sophie says she earned a certain salary at her last job, can it be exceeded? And with that question, the power balance shifts. Sophie is somehow in control, even as she will wrestle with it over the course of the film, and lose it entirely.

Chabrol joked that La cérémonie was “the last Marxist film,” and its examination of class is first-rate. The Lelièvres—comprising Catherine; her husband, Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel); his daughter, Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen); and her son, Gilles (Valentin Merlet)—live in sumptuous isolation, artlessly happy with one another and surrounded by high culture. Catherine owns an art gallery. The family spend their evenings watching opera broadcasts (though at one point they’re seen watching a clip from another Chabrol film, concurrently self-referential and ominous). Their collective crime is less about overt cruelty to the working class and much more about casual indifference, rendered visible as soon as Sophie walks in the door.

She cooks and cleans, and refuses to use the dishwasher. She hides at night, rapt in front of the television. And then Sophie is asked to perform a task that will require her to read. Her edifice cracks, her rage mounts, as she is unable to connect sounds and letters, and it becomes obvious to the audience that Sophie is illiterate. The scene jolts as much because of Bonnaire’s naked performance as its placement in the film: far too early to be a big reveal, but a pivotal revelation nonetheless.

Here is the first consonant moment. The vowel arrives when Sophie goes into the village on her day off and meets Jeanne for the first time. Jeanne, as Huppert plays her, is a whirling dervish, jettisoning norms that don’t apply to her, ruthlessly opening people’s mail (leading to a blowout argument with Georges, mutual hatred fully on display), a joy to behold precisely because she provokes extreme discomfort.

Jeanne’s palpable rage when Melinda discovers her in her broken-down car, effortlessly fixes it, asks for a tissue to wipe off the dirt, and then thoughtlessly throws it back in the car, narrowly missing Jeanne’s face—here is the unbridgeable difference between privilege and poverty, beauty and plainness, a sense of entitlement masked by generosity. Jeanne’s fury becomes ours as well, and it will unite in unholy matrimony with Sophie’s—exacerbated by her own tense interactions with Melinda, leading her to blackmail the girl over a secret pregnancy.

Chabrol compared the burgeoning relationship between Sophie and Jeanne to that between Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise, but the folie-à-deux dynamics between them reminded me more of two other duos: Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme (later the crime writer Anne Perry), the teenagers whose murder of Parker’s mother in New Zealand in 1954 became the basis for the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures; and the Papin sisters, the live-in maids who murdered their employer’s wife and daughter in France in 1933, an episode that became the basis of Jean Genet’s 1947 play The Maids. Both pairs, like Chabrol’s, created shared, fantastical, even taboo worlds to escape the drudgery of their small-town lives. They traversed the gossamer-thin line between fantasy and reality so often that when it broke apart for good, through murder, their shared worlds had nowhere to go and also shattered, never to be reconstituted again.

As soon as Sophie and Jeanne embrace each other on the bed—the transfixing eroticism less about sex and more about shared purpose—the ending is telegraphed: their newfound bond must blow apart. But 
others will be destroyed in the process.

As La cérémonie hurtles toward its final showdown, the Lelièvres are sitting down in front of the television, score in hand, ready to watch a taped broadcast of the opera Don Giovanni. Sophie and Jeanne, both banished from the manse, have sneaked back in, fondling the rifles handled earlier in the film by Georges, ransacking and shredding Catherine’s wardrobe in the master bedroom, madness mixing with fury into an alchemy from which there is no point of return. (As French audiences would recognize, the expression la cérémonie—which refers to the events leading up to a guillotine death—fully manifests itself.)

The violence shocks as much for the actual shootings as for the utter cluelessness of the Lelièvres, ready to blame backfiring cars and indulge in their own laziness rather than face what’s coming to them. And then, the final moment, as the credits roll, the camera squarely on Sophie’s face, a half-smile quivering on her lips. A fatal gorgeousness, if you will.

Classical music is full of great joy and grand tragedy, and Don Giovanni embodies those qualities perfectly. But as with the chewing gum, an earlier, quieter scene, this one also involving the use of classical music to advance the narrative, stayed with me even more. Sophie is setting the table in the main room; the Lelièvres are off-camera, but we hear them discussing Sophie’s capabilities as a maid. Then come the opening strains of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in all of their magisterial heartbreak, sound and fury, signifying everything. Sophie isn’t supposed to be hearing what her employers are discussing, but of course she hears every word. And the sense of separation grows wider, moldier, thicker, uglier.

Chabrol lets the big moments of La cérémonie play out in full and does not rush them. Our sense of dread is coupled with a sense of near-relief. But it’s the small moments—the chewing gum, the tossed tissue, the choice of a concerto—that resonate even more.