LA CEREMONIE (72)

Directed by: Claude Chabrol

Starring: Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset

The Pitch: In a French village, two young women - one of them a housekeeper to a well-off bourgeois family - form an unhealthily close, finally murderous relationship.

Theo Sez: A film so calm and deliberate (some might say icy) that it seems at first to be about nothing, merely an account of a heinous crime left more or less unexplained. But Chabrol's theme is the profound (if unfashionable) one of class, and specifically the middle-class - the same smug provincial bourgeoisie of LA FEMME INFIDELE, burying its collective head in cocktails and opera. The climactic murder proceeds directly - in measured, inevitable steps - from the class conflict in every master-and-servant relationship, the younger generation's semi-embarrassed, let's-just-be-friends attitude towards the maid as offensive as their parents' more authoritarian approach because all of them - their whole class - are unable to comprehend the nature of life across the social chasm, the pain of lives devoid of "ceremonie" (having to find it through rebellion and, finally, murder). Of course Chabrol - and, more to the point, his well-heeled target audience - isn't much better equipped for such understanding, and he's too sophisticated to demean his bourgeois family with hyperbolic satire, so the murder when it comes is genuinely shocking: we can only whimper that these stolid, equable people don't "deserve" to die. It takes a while for the irony to kick in - the point that the "ceremonie" comes with a built-in fail-safe device, that in fact the bourgeoisie, in all its ludicrous self-importance, is quite invincible. It's a great coda, making it clear that all are victims, and adding to the mix just enough compassion to turn a cold film into a chilling one.