La cérémonie
1995, directed by Claude Chabrol
There’s plenty of reason to think that La cérémonie is about class inequality. Claude Chabrol is known for his critiques of the bourgeoisie, and the gulf between the Lelièvre family and their maid Sophie makes itself felt everywhere. The Lelièvres behave imperiously, like when Melinda tosses an oily handkerchief into Jeanne’s car like a piece of garbage, or when they discuss Sophie’s performance within earshot of her: “We should teach her to serve properly.” An hour and a half into the film Jeanne says to Sophie, “Too bad there’s no food,” and the scene cuts to Georges Lelièvre saying “Great meal” over a handsomely appointed dinner table. This contrast is typical of the film, but if we reduce La cérémonie to a story of class conflict, its sympathies are less than clear.
The Lelièvres are conscious of their privilege, and they make many efforts to treat Sophie fairly, even in private when they discuss the most respectful way to refer to a domestic servant. They pay her more than she made before, they praise her cooking and cleaning, and they offer her numerous small favors like buying new eyeglasses or lending her the car. Conversely, Sophie and Jeanne behave monstrously. They humiliate an elderly couple, defile the château, and slaughter the Lelièvres. The denouement is so savage that it wouldn’t be likely to arouse sympathy for the proletariat if that were the idea.
It’s not that Chabrol has turned conservative in his late career. His films had never reduced class differences to the simplicity of good and evil. On the subject of those moral categories, a party guest of the Lelièvres drops a quote from Nietzsche: “There are aspects of good people I find loathsome, least of all the evil within them.” There is plenty in La cérémonie that we might be tempted to call “evil”, but that’s not what the film finds most loathsome. Instead it looks for the roots of people’s misbehavior.
When Sophie is first left alone in the mansion, she goes straight to the television, and the first thing on the screen is a quote from Voltaire’s friend the Marquis de Vauvenargues: “One cannot be just if one is not humane.” The constant thread in Chabrol’s long filmmaking career is a concern for justice. All the economic and social inequality in his stories, all the crime and passion, is an imbalance that only justice can set right. As Vauvenargues tells us, the precondition for justice is humanity. La cérémonie is built around a single germ of inhumanity that gives rise to all the injustice, inequality, and violence that follows. That germ is judgment, and none of the characters is immune to it. In fact the movie is adapted from a novel called A Judgement in Stone, and because Chabrol places judgment front and center, he evidently had to change the title to avoid making the subject too obvious.
The film starts with Sophie approaching her job interview. In full view of her prospective employer across the street, she nearly exposes her greatest insecurity, her illiteracy, as she heads into the wrong café and gets redirected. The interview goes well enough, and she gets the job, but anyone who’s been through a job interview knows the feeling of intense scrutiny it entails. Being subjected to judgment is a seemingly unavoidable drawback of modern life, but as the film goes on, the stress of constant judgment is omnipresent.
Before Sophie shows up, the family sizes her up in advance. Some of their judgments are routine (“Can the maid cook?”) and some are gratuitous (“I hope she’s not ugly.”) None of this seems the least bit extraordinary, though that’s half of the point. The next scene, however, will confirm the film’s particular interest in judgment. Catherine arrives to meet Sophie at the 9:00 train, and we’re left to watch as all the passengers step off and disperse, minus Sophie. Catherine lights a cigarette then perks up as she glances across the tracks. Sophie was early after all. The only reason to go through those motions was to let us feel the boss’s mounting disappointment as she began to suspect the worst in her new hire.
Both Jeanne and Sophie have ambiguous skeletons in their past. Each was investigated for the death of a family member, Jeanne’s daughter and Sophie’s father. The testimony we hear seems to lean in favor of Jeanne and against Sophie, but there’s nothing conclusive, and we don’t learn the full circumstances. The film never says whether either was guilty, precisely because, like Nietzsche, it’s not interested in “the evil within them”. These past incidents, rather, subject the women to the extremes of society’s judgment. We hear, for example, how Jeanne’s neighbor had called the police on her even as she begged for help for her burned child.
All the characters in La cérémonie take turns judging each other, some more readily than others. Jeanne is obsessed with gossip, digging up faults on the Lelièvres and mocking the parish priest and his assistant. Gilles is quiet, but he takes pleasure in suggesting the word “repulsive” for Sophie to his father. Melinda seems more charitable than the rest of her family, but she lets a magazine quiz channel her judgmental streak, coaxing Sophie to play “Are you a bitch?” Sophie refuses to supply gossip to Jeanne, but she listens to gossip with relish. She, more than anyone, feels the weight of judgment on her, and not coincidentally she’s the one who starts the massacre.
The hamartia in the plot, the single greatest engine of misfortune, is Sophie’s illiteracy, which evidently stems from extreme dyslexia. She’s a hard, conscientious worker, and she’s willing to look kindly on the Lelièvres, but the shame of her disability gradually crushes her. Despite her skill in other areas, one can imagine her humiliation, unable to read at even a three-year-old’s level. She can’t count change either, and a contemptuous cashier at the sweet shop is an example of the daily hardship she faces. She keeps a phonetic guidebook under lock and key for use in emergencies. She does everything to avoid detection, multiplying her workload as she walks to town and carries groceries. Rather than betraying her secret, she lets Georges think she’s insolent, and she ultimately gets fired for blackmail… all to evade judgment.
Unlike so many films about disabilities, particularly Hollywood award bait from around the same decade, La cérémonie does not sentimentalize Sophie’s trouble. She’s neither glamorized nor idealized, and she comes to a bad end. Some viewers will find catharsis in her rampage, others will be disgusted, but the movie never tells us how to feel. The point is not to judge her, or anyone else, but to try to understand, and to ask how many other Sophies might be living among us with their own secret shame.
Chabrol hasn’t left his usual class commentary behind. We see how inequality exacerbates judgments, but we can also see how judgments produce and perpetuate inequality. Sophie’s shame keeps her from rising higher. After the Vauvenargues quote, the television program shows a woman in a judge’s robe ascending the western steps of the Palais de Justice, France’s highest court, and the shot cuts to Sophie descending the steps into the kitchen, which Catherine then calls Sophie’s “domain”. At the door, Sophie passes a still life of a hunted rabbit. The same French judge’s uniform shown on tv is typically lined with rabbit’s fur, and the family’s name literally means “the hare” (le lièvre). When Sophie kills Georges he’ll lie slumped below the painting, mirroring the rabbit at a right angle. Her vengeance is against the upper class, but it’s also, in her mind, against the self-appointed judges who preside over her humiliation.
Sophie’s surname Bonhomme means “good man”, as in someone judged for his virtue. Melinda points out that “Sophie” is Greek for “wisdom”. It’s not that she is wise, but that the movie’s wisdom consists in seeing her for what she is, a victim of judgment who turns around and plays judge herself.
The title La cérémonie, which substitutes for the “Judgement” in the novel’s title, is a puzzle. The most obvious ceremonial act, a formal repeated action with an ulterior meaning, is the watching of television. Sophie and Jeanne make a ritual of it, as do the Lelièvres, with Georges going so far as to dress in a tuxedo to watch an opera at home. The grocery delivery man also admits making a ritual of television, telling Sophie of his participation in a telethon. (He and Jeanne both describe their charity work to Sophie in the kitchen right after someone says “Don’t bother”.)
The ritualistic quality of the television reaches its peak in the opera broadcast, and it points to a ceremonial aspect of the violent climax. As the action in the Lelièvre mansion builds toward murder, it mirrors Don Giovanni on the television. When Donna Anna throws a piece of clothing to the ground, Jeanne and Sophie toss clothes on the master bedroom floor. When swords come out in the opera, shotguns come out in the house. At the beginning of Act II when Don Giovanni trades places with his servant Leporello to seduce a maid, the two women murder the family, symbolically trading places with the bourgeoisie. Chabrol’s plots are often built around exchanges, and this exchange has the force of a revolution. What’s comic in the opera though is tragic in real life. Like most revolutions it ends badly, failing to overturn the power structure. The movie will end with a final and ironic expression of judgment as the trap closes – a policeman plays the recorded voices of Sophie and Jeanne after the massacre, saying “Good” (Ça va) and “Well done” (On a bien fait).
CONNECTIONS:
Ladies in Retirement – Hamartia and catharsis in a story of a maid killing her employer(s)
Les bonnes femmes – Industrialist who makes canned food that he won’t eat himself
Dogville – Woman who’s constantly judged until she turns the tables
Parasite – Servant(s) staging a coup in the employer’s house; ambiguity as to who is most at fault