3) La Ceremonie
Claude Chabrol was an individual who gave the medium of cinema a little bit of everything. He contributed some fine pieces of analysis to the highly influential Cahiers du Cinema magazine as a critic and he helped to spearhead the French New Wave movement that gathered spectacular momentum and changed the medium forever in the 1950’s. And yet, his greatest achievement in film arguably remains his 1996 thriller La Ceremonie – a twisted, terrifying examination of class struggle and social upheaval.
The film focuses on a glum, dumb maid named Sophie, a woman who finds herself constantly humiliated by her low-class stature and inability to read. Her only source of pleasure appears to be her television, which she drinks in with the same kind of zoned-out eyes that guide her around on day-to-day basis when she performs her mundane housekeeping duties for the Lelievre family. Her pupils truly light up for the first time after engaging with the ballsy postmistress Jeanne – a woman who despises the Lelièvre’s and amuses Sophie by pointing out the flaws and pompousness of their bourgeois lifestyle.
La Ceremonie is propelled forward by an eerie friendship that develops between Sophie and Jeanne, a relationship purposely given homoerotic undertones through careful shot selection and editing (Chabrol repeatedly packing the pair’s heads close together alongside one another in the frame). There’a a lot more to be said about the film – including where its origins lie – but all of it involves some kind of indication as to where the plot eventually leads. There’s little doubt that Chabrol’s movie will twist your stomach even if you are aware of what happens in the shocking final reels, but anyone less familiar with the source material behind La Ceremonie will undoubtedly be left shaken and shivering as the credits appear.
