1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 42: La cérémonie
I’m in no hurry to watch all the movies of Claude Chabrol, fascinating though they are. His is a nasty sort of oddness, a peculiarly repulsive amorality. The characters’ depravity is very gradually drawn out, with an effect less horrific than disgusting, as if we’d been led through a well-tended garden to be shown a dead rat.
The other day I saw, on some train tracks, a raccoon’s body neatly sliced in two. Chabrol’s movies feel like that. They even have titles like “A Girl Cut in Two” and “The Butcher.”
La cérémonie, elegant, streamlined, is no different. As Roger Ebert tells us, “The French have a name for the events leading up to death by guillotine. They call it ‘the ceremony.’”
So, in this movie, we have: (A) the exploiters: an industrialist, his pampered wife (an art-dealing ex-model), and their privileged, complacent children; and (B) the proles, played by two splendidly inscrutable actresses: Sandrine Bonnaire as the family’s quiet housemaid, and Isabelle Huppert as the postmistress, the housemaid’s aggressively disreputable friend. Chabrol has said that this is a “Marxist” movie. To what extent should we agree? Yes, there is a revolution; but are these revolutionaries the properly Marxian sort? If the housemaid and postmistress do belong to any Marxian category, they must be lumpenproletariat – the lowest of the low, the bottom-out-of-sights – even though they have jobs and don’t look down-and-out. They are antisocial criminals, rejected by and rejecting everyone else. Marx had little use for such people.
So, yes, Chabrol may be sneering at the upper classes, but perhaps he also is sneering at Marx and at other proponents of revolution. In this movie the rich are condescending and snobbish, but those who overthrow them have even less human feeling, and their actions are monstrous. If Chabrol is taking a side, which is it? Or does he just like to wallow?
Reviewers acknowledge the class conflict to dismiss it. The key dynamic, they insist, is psycho-sexual: the brash postmistress takes over the will of the weakminded housemaid.
I am not convinced. The housemaid may be illiterate, but she is no pushover. In the source novel, Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone, the housemaid clearly is the stronger figure.
In both the novel and the movie, the postmistress is pretty silly, but the housemaid is about as silly as a cancer.
The novel (set in Britain, not France) begins like this:
Only, Parasite is more straightforward and, in a way, more hopeful. It’s understandable enough for the classes in Parasite to exploit each other for their own gain. This is a problem that can be addressed.
The vengeance in La cérémonie is much bleaker.
The other day I saw, on some train tracks, a raccoon’s body neatly sliced in two. Chabrol’s movies feel like that. They even have titles like “A Girl Cut in Two” and “The Butcher.”
La cérémonie, elegant, streamlined, is no different. As Roger Ebert tells us, “The French have a name for the events leading up to death by guillotine. They call it ‘the ceremony.’”
So, in this movie, we have: (A) the exploiters: an industrialist, his pampered wife (an art-dealing ex-model), and their privileged, complacent children; and (B) the proles, played by two splendidly inscrutable actresses: Sandrine Bonnaire as the family’s quiet housemaid, and Isabelle Huppert as the postmistress, the housemaid’s aggressively disreputable friend. Chabrol has said that this is a “Marxist” movie. To what extent should we agree? Yes, there is a revolution; but are these revolutionaries the properly Marxian sort? If the housemaid and postmistress do belong to any Marxian category, they must be lumpenproletariat – the lowest of the low, the bottom-out-of-sights – even though they have jobs and don’t look down-and-out. They are antisocial criminals, rejected by and rejecting everyone else. Marx had little use for such people.
So, yes, Chabrol may be sneering at the upper classes, but perhaps he also is sneering at Marx and at other proponents of revolution. In this movie the rich are condescending and snobbish, but those who overthrow them have even less human feeling, and their actions are monstrous. If Chabrol is taking a side, which is it? Or does he just like to wallow?
Reviewers acknowledge the class conflict to dismiss it. The key dynamic, they insist, is psycho-sexual: the brash postmistress takes over the will of the weakminded housemaid.
I am not convinced. The housemaid may be illiterate, but she is no pushover. In the source novel, Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone, the housemaid clearly is the stronger figure.
In both the novel and the movie, the postmistress is pretty silly, but the housemaid is about as silly as a cancer.
The novel (set in Britain, not France) begins like this:
Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.Interpreted psycho-sexually, the movie fits into the tradition I discussed in my review of Normal Life. Interpreted in terms of class struggle, it is more like Parasite.
There was no real motive and no premeditation. No money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as a twentieth-century woman.
Only, Parasite is more straightforward and, in a way, more hopeful. It’s understandable enough for the classes in Parasite to exploit each other for their own gain. This is a problem that can be addressed.
The vengeance in La cérémonie is much bleaker.
