Ruth Rendell didn’t like many adaptations of her books but she did like 1995’s La Cérémonie (The Ceremony), a reworking of her thriller A Judgment in Stone. She wasn’t alone. Roger Ebert put it on his Great Movies list, the Cahiers du Cinéma people named it the best film of 1995, and Bong Joon Ho says it’s one of the main inspirations for Parasite, his Best Picture Oscar winner from 2019.
It’s a chilly, anxious thriller about a mouselike maid working for a rich French family who strikes up a friendship with a woman who runs the local post office. Sophie is cool, efficient, doesn’t say much and does her job so brilliantly the family cannot believe their luck at finding her. Jeanne is flighty, loud, nosy and has a chip on her shoulder about the family in the big house.
Two brilliant performances here, by Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie and Isabelle Huppert as Jeanne, who start off as quite distinct characters but gradually meld almost into one, eventually wearing their hair the same, dressing alike and aping each other’s expressions. Once Sophie and Jeanne abandon their “home” personalities and start wandering into new territory something aberrant also seems to happen, which is how come they end up creeping through the big house armed with shotguns while the family watches opera on TV unawares.
Entitled wasn’t a word bandied about a lot in the 1990s, but this is a brilliant portrait of it. As they’re about to take Sophie on, the family – Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) and the kids Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Valentin Merlet) – have a conversation about what to call her. “The maid” seems too stuffy and old-school, they opine, and they’re much more egalitarian than that. And yet, as director Claude Chabrol reveals in one tiny thoughtless act after another, the truth is that the familiy are living inside a benign fantasy about themselves. Whatever they say or call her, to them Sophie is just a skivvy. Which is actually fine with her… until her attitude is weaponised by contact with Jeanne’s class-conscious take on the world.
Sophie, it turns out, is also illiterate, a detail that would work better as a character curlicue in a book. A token of her helplessness, it also emphasises her apartness and her difference from Jeanne, who uses her position at the post office to open and read people’s letters.
Set beneath the cool grey skies of Brittany in Northern France, largely inside one of the elegantly dog-eared houses decorated in tasteful shades, this is a thriller that makes a steady progress, advancing in small but ratchet-like steps. Though Bonnaire and Huppert are the obvious focus, Jacqueline Bisset does a lot of the emotive background work. She sets the tone and then adjusts it in micro-inflections. She is the house’s tasteful shades incarnate and, as Chabrol works his cast up the scale of anxiety, she is his canary in the coalmine. The endlessly under-estimated Bisset, so good it’s almost impossible to detect what she’s doing.
“La cérémonie” is the French term for the procedure of executing someone for a capital crime, so for French speakers there’s a big hint as to where this is all heading. Even so, Chabrol works incredibly stealthily. Big plot shifts arrive unannounced and Chabrol is shifting the terrain under his characters’ feet even as the end credits roll.
For the ghouls, there is the fact that the story is based on the case of sisters Christine and Lea Pepin, live-in maids in the 1930s who killed their employer’s wife and daughter. But there’s some read-across to Joseph Losey’s The Servant, in which Dirk Bogarde’s gentleman’s gentleman takes class-based revenge on his social superior. Both very, very cool propositions, the stiletto rather than the bludgeon.
La Cérémonie aka The Ceremony – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
