La Cérémonie

(aka The Ceremony and A Judgement in Stone, Claude Chabrol, France/Germany, 1995)

I was hanging out for Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie during 1995. Overseas friends assured me it was the best film by him in 25 years – one of those ‘returns to form’ that publicists love to trumpet. Twenty-five ... yep, that puts it directly in line after Chabrol’s masterpieces of the late 1960s, such as Le boucher (1970) – still his very best film. Then I saw that the editors of Cahiers du cinéma proudly placed La cérémonie at the top of their annual top 10 films poll, above The Flower of My Secret (1995), Ed Wood (1994) and other movies I greatly appreciate.

In his career, Chabrol’s love for the films of Alfred Hitchcock led him almost immediately to the various forms of mystery fiction: detective stories, psychological mysteries, whodunit murder puzzles. He's done superb work in that loosely defined genre – and also quite a lot of lazy, sometimes outrightly bad work. His prolific output (for both cinema and TV) is extraordinarily uneven in its achievement. It is as if he always needs strong script material (he’s often co-writer), or else his imagination and discernment as a director just doesn't kick in – a hardly uncommon situation among fine filmmakers.

Chabrol has adapted literary works by many of the greatest authors of mystery fiction, and for this project he chose Ruth Rendell. Her fans tell me that the feel of the specific 1977 novel (A Judgement in Stone), and the feel of her books in general, has been captured well and translated faithfully by Chabrol to a French setting.

We are presented with an upper middle-class family, the Lelièvre clan; Jacqueline Bisset is the mother Catherine and Jean-Pierre Cassel is the father George, and there are two teenage children, Gilles (Valentin Merlet) and Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen). They hire a live-in maid, a blank, untalkative, slightly weird, working-class girl Sophie, played with sullen intensity by Sandrine Bonnaire.

From very early on, there is a sense that everything in this depicted world is slightly, uncannily out of-whack, that there are seething tensions and mysteries underneath the calm surface of things. This sense starts precisely at the moment when Catherine goes to the local train station to pick up Sophie, and finds her eerily already standing on another platform, as if she’s been there forever.

Unfolding plot revelations matter in Chabrol, so I won’t give them away here for any innocent, first-time viewer. Suffice to say, there’s a mystery surrounding Sophie – several, in fact – and the best scenes cleverly reveal this. In fact, La Cérémonie has an intriguing, engaging way of marrying the characters’ behavioural tics to the unfolding intrigue of the narrative. Caroline Eliacheff, Chabrol’s co-writer here, is a popular psychoanalyst and columnist; she worked on several subsequent films with him, and also on Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010).

As a director, Chabrol works with details, gliding briskly from one small point to another. The characters’ gestures – the way they handle beloved objects, make slips of the tongue, fold up their clothes, or reach for the salad bowl at the dinner table – are always what betray them, giving them away to us and sometimes to each other. And it’s these gestures and details that quietly mark the stages of the story and the direction of its psychological mystery. That focus is a pleasure to behold.

The members of this perfectly middle-class family are a curious bunch. They are not completely monstrous, like Chabrol's bourgeois screen families have sometimes been, not full-out grotesque. They dwell in their own high-art cosiness, their familial rituals, their shared complicities and intimacies, in a way that seems (at least on first glance) fairly ordinary.

But then their petty manners, compulsive neatness and, especially, their casual superiority gradually move into the foreground of our attention. There’s a terrifically telling detail in a scene where Melinda stops on the road to help out the other major working-class character of this story, the postwoman Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert). This pert little lady gets her hands oily from looking under Jeanne’s car hood; she asks for a tissue, wipes her hands on it and then just flings the used tissue back into the car, virtually into Jeanne’s face – completely oblivious to the lordliness and violence of her gesture.

Sophie and Jeanne come to form a couple of sorts, a proletarian duo. Where Sophie is constrained and hidden, Jeanne spills out all over the place. She flounces around, sticks her chewing gum under office tabletops, and opens other people’s mail for a peek whenever she feels like it. Jeanne has cultivated her aggression toward the middle classes, and particularly towards the Lelièvre family. So, in time, she acts on Sophie, nudging her towards small acts of rebellion and indifference.

We witness a slow unravelling of the social fabric, and the spectacle is compelling. There’s a long sequence where the two women go out collecting clothes for the poor, doing voluntary work for the local church. This mission descends into an anarchic adventure, with Jeanne ripping open bags, flinging junk into faces of the elderly – and justifying her actions by explaining, “Well, the poor can't use just any old trash of yours!” Deborah Thomas has written an illuminating essay (in the book Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film) on La Cérémonie, using Erving Goffman’s 1970s concept of frame analysis – not the filmic frame, but the boundaries (invisible but palpably demarcated) of ‘personal space’ as defined by status, class, habit, routine, rules, and so on. Is Chabrol’s art the marriage of this kind of social ‘framing’ with the (intermittent) felicities of his mise en scène?

In this depiction of the intense, developing bond between Sophie and Jeanne – and its growing anti-social character – the echo can be detected of a number of contemporaneous films, Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) and Nancy Meckler’s Sister My Sister (1994, a dramatisation of the 1930s Papin sisters murder case that clearly inspired Chabrol, since it’s on the same wavelength as the true-life story of Violette Nozière he adapted in 1978). La Cérémonie gingerly includes the hint of a lesbian dimension to this friendship; but finally, Chabrol is delicate and evasive on that score, just as when he gets to hints of slightly perverse sexual feelings between parents and children in the bosom of the bourgeois family.

When I first saw La Cérémonie in 1996 on its Australian theatrical release, I was somewhat disappointed. Why? I found myself at odds with much said about it by other reviewers. On SBS TV’s The Movie Show, Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton described it as sad and tragic, and Chabrol was duly designated a master of cinematic storytelling – as if anyone would be mad to disagree with such a self-evident truth. Similar terms popped up in the Sunday Age review by Tom Ryan, keen Chabrol appreciator (and fierce champion of his later, more contested output). Tom’s rave review ended thus: “At least part of its mastery lies in the fact that, such is the breadth of its emotional grasp, it is finally impossible to abandon one's sympathies for the characters”. Sadness, tragedy, breath of emotion, sympathy, mastery: personally, I thought these qualities to be somewhat lacking.

At moments, the film has the air of a desultory exercise. It is certainly Chabrolian, but in way that's unexciting, as if the director just chucked around a few of his familiar motifs, obsessions and signature touches. If Chabrol’s work is sometimes lazy, that is certainly evident here. Despite the crisp editing and the sharpness of detail, it’s mostly lit, shot and staged like a bland telemovie. (Legendary anecdotes of Chabrol setting up an elaborate crane shot so that he can snooze in the corner after lunch are charming, but not exactly edifying.) But am I just not looking and listening closely enough? That’s possible, after only a single viewing. Yet I heed Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s admonition, already from 20 years earlier.

The films are becoming sloppier and sloppier in form. Sometimes you think Chabrol has just discovered the zoom, the most pathetic of all film techniques. In every film one or two incredibly beautiful traveling shots; otherwise, nothing doing – flat, slick images with no attention to the lighting or the colours. (The Anarchy of the Imagination, p. 95)

The music (by Claude’s son Matthieu, contributor to his films since the early 1980s) is a clattering, bombastic, redundant score for chamber orchestra, full of corny dissonance. I won’t tell you what the ending of the film is, but I will say that no two people seem to have exactly the same idea about what is actually going on in the final seconds as the credits roll. Like Dario Argento, Chabrol likes to get out fast at the end, leaving us (at the very least) disoriented. The effect is not always well-judged.

There’s a level of two-dimensional caricature in the conception of the characters and in some of the acting, as well as in the ideas for certain key scenes. I’m thinking, for example, of the part of La Cérémonie where the bourgeois family gather around to watch a creaky-looking opera presentation on TV, oblivious to everything else going on around them. The working-class duo, on the other hand, usually sit on the floor gawking at game shows or garish music videos with rapping Muppets in them. It’s Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological classic Distinction (1979) illustrated!

But my problem goes deeper than questions of style or execution to touch upon the sensibility or attitude that informs the material. Watching La Cérémonie sent me back to a famous polemical attack on Chabrol by a fellow film director written in 1975: “Insects in a Glass Case” by Fassbinder, which I’ve already cited above. (I first read it under that title in an essay of Film Comment, but the most reliable translation appears as “… Shadows, to be Sure, and no Pity” in the 1992 Fassbinder anthology The Anarchy of the Imagination, from which I’ve taken these quotations.) The argument reflects the radical, left-wing politics of Fassbinder in his time and culture. In essence, he accuses Chabrol of approaching his characters like tiny specimens caught and observed with a misanthropic cruelty.

At first – and this is a familiar, rather normative, critical gesture – Fassbinder wishes that Chabrol could sometimes present three-dimensional people, not ciphers, shadows or caricatures, and that he could do so with some tenderness rather than unremitting harshness. But – perhaps because Fassbinder himself as a filmmaker was not averse to a few rounds of spikey, black comedy – he works his way around to another point of view, flipping the argument. Sure, he reflects, Chabrol can show us monsters, stunted, disfigured characters, fools, ugly, stupid characters – but at least he must make us feel some rage at the horrible world/society that has produced people like this, deforming lives and feelings in this way.

Is La Cérémonie misanthropic? Not angrily so (as Fassbinder might have wanted), but casually. Chabrol’s misanthropy has, I believe, always been rather whimsical, playful even. Throughout his career, he has returned time and again to two social types: the monstrous middle-class citizen, and the sociopathic, working-class brute … who is often, for him, female. The middle-class type is sick and horrid, while the working-class type is sick and murderous. There are very few positive characters or positive values in Chabrol’s universe; and hence no compassion, and not even a glimpse of a possible, better world, where these characters could ever turn out less stupid or evil.

Chabrol’s world has a Darwinian or Hobbesian determinism to it: ultimately, all human insects are born that way, their horribleness programmed into their genes. And the principal novelty of La Cérémonie is simply that it puts his two favourite types into the one movie, the one story – courtesy of Ruth Rendell.

You may object: Chabrol can’t be completely conservative if his films show the realities and divisions of social class. But even at this level, there’s something airy and false. Fassbinder remarks that Chabrol is not a social critic but a cynic: “France has in Chabrol a cynic within the system, a cynic with great longing for naiveté, for a lost identity” (Anarchy, p. 94). With La Cérémonie, it seems Chabrol’s longing has fixed on a new ‘lost object’. He delights in describing it as “the last Marxist movie” – something I’m sure my Marxist friends will be overjoyed to hear! Is that really all the class struggle, or the class war, is to Chabrol – a good, old story from a bygone time, a time when radical arguments and struggles seemed to matter, when they seemed to refer to something real?

But La Cérémonie is nothing like a contemporary Marxist, left-wing movie (by Ken Loach, for instance). Chabrol is, as ever, the misanthrope, the cynic – and the easy nihilism of his stance puts his treatment of this story closer to grotesque comedies like The Young Poisoner’s Handbook (1995), or a blankly chilling serial killer movie such as Seven (1995).

For me, La Cérémonie lacks bite. And that has something to do, I feel, with Chabrol’s preferred genre for almost his whole career: the mystery story. This film is not a whodunit murder mystery; the mysteries here are those of psychology, personal motivation. But the ultimate effect resembles, for example, The Usual Suspects (1995): once the plot has played itself out and all mysteries have been revealed, there is simply nothing left, no resonance, nothing to turn over or cast back though in your mind.

That's certainly not true of Hitchcock’s mystery classics, such as Vertigo (1958) or Psycho (1960). But Chabrol comes perilously close, now and then, to hitting the rock bottom of the genre – by making purely functional films with no lingering mysteries.

Postscript 2024: I arrived at a deeper appreciation of Chabrol’s cinema overall when I had the opportunity to provide an audio commentary for Les Cousins (1960). This appeared in DVD editions from Madman (Australia, 2009) and Criterion (USA, 2011).

MORE Chabrol: L'Enfer, Madame Bovary, Docteur M

© Adrian Martin May 1996 (+ updates)