Jump to content

La Cérémonie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

La Cérémonie
Film poster
Directed byClaude Chabrol
Written byClaude Chabrol
Caroline Eliacheff
Produced byMarin Karmitz
StarringIsabelle Huppert
Sandrine Bonnaire
Jacqueline Bisset
Jean-Pierre Cassel
Virginie Ledoyen
Valentin Merlet
Serge Rousseau
CinematographyBernard Zitzermann
Edited byMonique Fardoulis
Music byMatthieu Chabrol
Release date
  • 30 August 1995 (1995-08-30) (France)
Running time
112 minutes
Countries
  • France
  • Germany
LanguageFrench
Box office$10,882,920[1]

La Cérémonie (English: lit. The Ceremony also known as A Judgment In Stone) is a 1995 French psychological thriller film by written and directed by Claude Chabrol. Starring Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire and adapted from the 1977 novel A Judgement In Stone by Ruth Rendell. The story follows Sophie an efficient, but quiet, cold and offbeat maid hired to work on the countryside house of a rich family. There, she befriends Jeanne, the local postmistress but soon, that friendship starts taking an increasingly dark turn.

The film echoes the case of Christine and Lea Papin, two French maids who brutally murdered their employer's wife and daughter in 1933, as well as the 1947 play they inspired, The Maids by Jean Genet.[2]

The film received widespread critical acclaim with praise for Chabrol's screenplay and directing, and Bonnaire and Huppert's performances. In an interview, South Korean director Bong Joon Ho said the movie was one of his main inspirations to his Oscar-winning acclaimed 2019 film, Parasite.[3]

Plot

[edit]

La Cérémonie tells the story of a young woman, Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire),[4] who is hired as a maid by the Lelièvre family. The Lelièvres live in an isolated mansion in Brittany. The family consists of four members: Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and Georges, the parents, who have no children together, but one each from previous marriages. Gilles is Catherine's and her ex-husband's son. Melinda is Georges' and his late wife's daughter. She studies at a university and only spends the weekends at home, where she invites her boyfriend Jérémie. The household chores are excessive for Catherine – who owns her own art gallery – so she requires a maid's help and hires Sophie. Throughout the film Sophie avoids using the dishwasher, refuses to take driving lessons, buys fake eyeglasses, and has trouble giving a cashier the correct change. The viewer finds out later that Sophie is illiterate and has a history of violence since she is believed to have killed her disabled father, or at least not to have rescued him from the fire she might have set in his house.

Once in the small village, Sophie meets Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), the postmistress, who occasionally works in a charity and usually comments she enjoys reading. With time, Jeanne influences the protagonist, since she critics and behaves aggressively towards people, specially the Lelièvres, whose mail sometimes she vandalises. She also has a violent history: she was the prime suspect with the murder of her four-year-old daughter, but she was later acquitted. The two friends meet regularly either for a charity collects -where Jeanne also proves to be critical and not settling for accepting "garbage" just because is charity- or for a film; television being Sophie's main pastime. Sophie is treated rather nicely at the Lelièvres, but their patronizing attitude, and their excessive lifestyle creates a feeling of bitterness and frustration both in Sophie and in Jeanne. This reaches its climax when Georges fires Sophie for attempting to blackmail Melinda, who accidentally found out about her illiteracy. On what seems like a revenge, Sophie and Jeanne seize Georges's shotguns and murder the family while they were watching an opera concert.

Jeanne leaves the crime scene and is killed in a car accident by the priest who had fired her from the charity she worked for. Sophie, for her part, walks away from the house after having wiped their fingerprints off the guns, making her way through the police squads at the accident. The end credits begin with the music of the opera that is being played back by a policeman on Melinda's tape-recorder, which Jeanne stole and put in her car. At the end of the credits, the gunshots can be heard on the tape and then the voices of Jeanne and Sophie, ironically, constituting evidence against them. Chabrol presents an ambiguous view of culture and class conflict in this film, which he jokingly called "the last Marxist film."[5]

Production

[edit]

Principal photography began on 12 January 1995 and completed on 4 March 1995.[6]

Reviews

[edit]

Rotten Tomatoes reports 93% approval for La Cérémonie, with 26 of 28 reviews positive.[7] On 17 April 2012, Roger Ebert added La Cérémonie to his list of "Great Movies".[8]

The Guardian included La Cérémonie at #16 in its "25 Best Crime Films of All Time".[9]

Craig Williams on the BFI website calls it "perhaps Chabrol's greatest achievement", and "the consummate example of Chabrol's genius – a ruthlessly exacting vision of class indebted to both the pulp aesthetic... and French literary tradition."[10]

The Criterion Collection called La Cérémonie "a must-see late-career triumph [...] [that] exemplifies the New Wave auteur's mastery of suspense and twisted psychodrama."[11] The film is available on the Criterion Channel for streaming.

Awards and nominations

[edit]

See also

[edit]

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ "La Cérémonie". JP's Box-Office.
  2. ^ fr:La Cérémonie (film, 1995)
  3. ^ Ellwood, Gregory (11 October 2019). "Parasite: Bong Joon Ho Reveals Five Films That Inspired His Masterpiece". The Playlist. Retrieved 20 August 2025.
  4. ^ New York Times Review
  5. ^ DVDs of the week: The Night of The Shooting Stars, Day of the Dead and more 15 April 2006
  6. ^ "La Ceremonie".
  7. ^ La Cérémonie at Rotten Tomatoes
  8. ^ La Cérémonie at Roger Ebert
  9. ^ "La Cérémonie: No 16 best crime film of all time". TheGuardian.com. 17 October 2010.
  10. ^ "Claude Chabrol: 10 essential films". British Film Institute. 24 June 2016. Retrieved 9 September 2019.
  11. ^ Criterion Channel [@criterionchannl] (16 March 2020). "LA CÉRÉMONIE (1995)—a must-see late-career triumph from Claude Chabrol starring Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert—exemplifies the New Wave auteur's mastery of suspense and twisted psychodrama. https://t.co/DWn38QVxy9 https://t.co/n6Q4iOpo9p" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 15 October 2021. Retrieved 24 January 2022 – via Twitter.
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=La_Cérémonie&oldid=1322099479"