Chabrol was one of the most enigmatic directors. A fringe instigator of the original New Wave, he managed to create a world for himself -- some private Hollywood -- in which it was possible to produce a stream of subtle studies of human motivation.
-- David Thomson
Claude Chabrol was one of those directors whose films to which I always looked forward: he made more that fifty films between 1958 and his death in 2010. He didn't always get the scripts or the actors or the money he wanted but he always persevered to make the film, including more that a dozen that I would call masterpieces, among La Ceremonie, from his late period, based on Ruth Rendell's Judgement in Stone and Jean Genet's The Maids. The title refers to the march to the guillotine, though in this case it is a march to the death for a bourgeois family (mother, father, two children) who hire a maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), and treat her condescendingly and patronizingly. Sophie, who manages to hide the fact that she is illiterate, becomes friends with a postal clerk Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) who encourages Sophie to rebel.
Class distinctions are clear-cut in La Ceremonie, with Jeanne and Sophie watch variety shows on TV while their employer Madame Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) and her family watch Mozart operas. One can see this film as Chabrol saw it, as Marxist, but also as a warning about everything from keeping guns in the house to making sure you employees are properly vetted (both Sophie and Jeanne were suspected of murder) and not taking your bourgeois life for granted, though even if you do all these things one can never be certain of anyone's motivations. The low-key cinematography for La Ceremonie is by Bernard Zitzerman and the effectively sparse score is by Mattieu Chabrol, Claude Chabrol's son.
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