“La Cérémonie“ (1995)
A brilliantly unsettling film and the arguable peak of the fruitful collaboration between French director Claude Chabrol and French actress Isabelle Huppert, “La Ceremonie” is based on the Ruth Rendell novel “A Judgement in Stone,” but transposes the book’s themes of murderous social envy and class distinction in ’70s Britain to rural Brittany in the early ’90s. Chabrol lets the film unfold like the slow-burn anatomy of a crime-in-waiting, as Sandrine Bonnaire‘s resentful, secretive Sophie, hired as a maid by a wealthy family, meets the touchpaper of Huppert’s postmistress Jeanne, a creature of bizarrely banal malevolence. It’s a thrilling film, even in its early stages when nothing much appears to happen except for Sophie ungraciously declining her employers’ well-meaning gestures, like offering to buy her glasses or paying for driving lessons. It’s the revelation of Sophie’s illiteracy that makes sense of her ingratitude, and Chabrol spins his web so skillfully that we understand how those kindly intended offers could seem like humiliations in a malformed mind. The film’s most impressive facet is that without its two protagonists ever making a play for our sympathies (they remain uncompromisingly unlikeable throughout), somehow we start to find the family’s bourgeois complacency and unconscious elitism despicable. What family sits uncomplainingly together to watch an opera on TV? What teenage girl has a “favorite part” of “Don Giovanni“? It builds slowly to an excruciatingly tense finale, and it’s a mark of true genius that though there is only one way this story can go, we are nonetheless shocked. As the murderers-to-be roam around the house, we wait for Sophie’s horror to register at each new escalation of Jeanne’s. But that horror never comes, and instead the pair live out their sullen revenge fantasy in a ghastly fit of girlish giddiness.
As we mentioned, there are literally hundreds of other titles in the loosely-defined European neo-noir category that you could move on to if these have whetted your appetite, but a few that we nearly included here include: “Shoot The Piano Player” — the absence of any Truffaut film (several of which fit the bill) is probably the biggest omission above, but we wanted to feature countries other than France; ditto Bertrand Tavernier‘s “Coup de Torchon,” also starring Isabelle Huppert and based on a Jim Thompson novel (“Pop 1280″ one of his seamiest and best); Rene Clement‘s “Plein Soleil” is the “Talented Mr. Ripley” adaptation starring Alain Delon referenced above; “Alphaville” is Godard’s sci-fi noir mindfuck experiment; while more recent films like Matthieu Kassovitz‘s “The Crimson Rivers” starring Vincent Cassel and Jean Reno, and Chabrol’s “Merci Pour Le Chocolat” have kept the neo-noir fires burning brightly in France. But there are also further hybridizations, like Czech animation “Alois Nebel,” Serbian film “The Trap” and British entries like “WAZ” with Tom Hardy and Stellan Skarsgard that prove the genre’s going strong all over the place —if you really want to dive in further, there’s a hugely comprehensive list of 650+ titles drawn up by an IMDB user here.
In the meantime, let us know if you’ve checked out any of these, and what you yourself would recommend next to anyone bitten by the Euro noir bug.— with Oli Lyttelton
