La Cérémonie
Claude Chabrol
Sophie is hired as a maid by the Lelièvres, a bourgeois family living in Saint Malo. Secretive and taciturn, the newcomer from the village meets Jeanne, the intrusive postwoman. She has a deep hatred of the Lelièvres and decides to set Sophie against her employers. The young, secretly illiterate maid allows herself to be manipulated without offering any resistance. This friendship will set off a series of dramas.
With : Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Virginie Ledoyen
Screenplay : Caroline Eliacheff, Claude Chabrol
Image : Bertrand Zitzermann
Editing : Monique Fardoulis
Music : Matthieu Chabrol
Screenplay : Caroline Eliacheff, Claude Chabrol
Image : Bertrand Zitzermann
Editing : Monique Fardoulis
Music : Matthieu Chabrol
Production : MK2 Productions, France 3 Cinéma, Olga Film, ZDF
Distribution: Diaphana
Distribution: Diaphana
"The bourgeoisie is not an obsession. But it is the only class we have left, which governs us, the most ridiculous class and the most interesting. You can hit out at it... and it's like hitting thin air, but not quite" (C. Chabrol). In this amoral and crepuscular story on the reversibility of the notions of good and evil, power is a multi-facetted object of desire (culture, material goods and property, appearance and apparel). Power stolen by blackmail and mute violence, in parallel to a complicity bound by the secret. Here the story which inspired the novel and then the adaptation (the crime of the Papin sisters in 1933) takes on its full meaning through the Chabrolian power of words.