TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES
Isabelle Huppert, European |
© Carlotta films
La Cérémonie
Claude Chabrol
1995 - France / Germany - 1h51
Screenings :
friday 26 - 9:45 pm - Centre de congrès - Auditorium - presented by Isabelle Huppert - actress
A middle-class family recruits a new maid, Sophie. Sophie suffers from a handicap that she hides from her employers: she is illiterate. Things take a turn for the worse when she befriends Jeanne, the postmistress who opens letters.
“Never before has Claude Chabrol taken his hostility to the bourgeois ethos to such an incandescent level, especially when it is draped in respectability, which in the end takes on the trappings of distinction, to use Bourdieu's sense of the term, that is to say in distinctive cultural practices. For example, the Lelièvre family are executed at the very moment when, to add insult to injury, they put on their finest clothes to watch an opera on television. The charge is obviously political, but Chabrol has no intention of asserting it like a profession of faith, great player that he is, right up to the astonishing final denouement where the murderers, modern avatars of the Papin sisters, are themselves victims of a terrible fate, as if it were necessary to put fiction back on its feet and remind us of the demiurgic role of the author, who grants themselves the right of life and death over all their characters.
“For the rest, the actors are outstanding, led by Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire, both of whom won the Volpi Cup at the 1995 Venice Film Festival: Huppert's role as a viscerally shameless postmistress is one of the best of her career, proving once again that her collaboration with Chabrol was an important milestone in her magnificent artistic career; Bonnaire plays a mute, illiterate maid who keeps her disapproving feelings to herself and lives with the shame of being discovered. Through her marches a cohort whose fate has been documented by Marxism, the ‘damned of the earth', suffering the humiliation of being socially dominated, tied to the service of the bourgeois who despise them. In the role of the patriarch, who oozes arrogance, Jean-Pierre Cassel delivers a top-class performance, like a more cautious version of the despicable Paul Decourt in Que la bête meure (The Beast Must Die).
“Years later, one of the Chabrol's masterpieces remains a searingly topical film: yes, it could well be that the socially despised turn violence against those who unleashed it.” (Jérémy Gallet; avoir-alire.com)
“For the rest, the actors are outstanding, led by Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire, both of whom won the Volpi Cup at the 1995 Venice Film Festival: Huppert's role as a viscerally shameless postmistress is one of the best of her career, proving once again that her collaboration with Chabrol was an important milestone in her magnificent artistic career; Bonnaire plays a mute, illiterate maid who keeps her disapproving feelings to herself and lives with the shame of being discovered. Through her marches a cohort whose fate has been documented by Marxism, the ‘damned of the earth', suffering the humiliation of being socially dominated, tied to the service of the bourgeois who despise them. In the role of the patriarch, who oozes arrogance, Jean-Pierre Cassel delivers a top-class performance, like a more cautious version of the despicable Paul Decourt in Que la bête meure (The Beast Must Die).
“Years later, one of the Chabrol's masterpieces remains a searingly topical film: yes, it could well be that the socially despised turn violence against those who unleashed it.” (Jérémy Gallet; avoir-alire.com)
CAST AND CREW
Cast : Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Jacqueline Bisset, Virginie Ledoyen
Screenplay : Claude Chabrol, Caroline Eliacheff
Cinematography : Bernard Zitzermann
Sound : Jean-Bernard Thomasson, Claude Villand
Editing : Monique Fardoulis
Music : Matthieu Chabrol
Production : Les Productions Traversiere, MK2 Productions, Olga Film, Prokino Filmproduktion
French distributor : Carlotta