A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock. (Never mind that Hitchcock worked successfully in many different genres and that his true hallmark was absolute mastery of composition, camera movement and editing while Chabrol has no particular visual talent at all and largely sticks to psychological thrillers.) Unfortunately, his work is much more uneven than Hitch’s, and La Ceremonie does nothing to improve his batting average.

The film stars Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, a maid with a dreadful secret she’ll do anything to keep, namely that she’s illiterate. What sort of background did she come from that she never learned to read? Why didn’t she try to do something about the problem once she grew up? How has she managed to get by for so long, and what would happen if someone found out? The film leaves these pressing questions unanswered, and devotes no more time to sketching in any other aspects of her character either. She’s a chilly, unexpressive woman with no apparent goals or desires to help move the story forward, so most of the movie is effectively static. Her new employers, the well-to-do Lelievres, want her to cook and clean, so she cooks and cleans. The postal clerk she meets, Jeanne, played by Isabelle Huppert, wants to be her friend, so she hangs out with her and does whatever Jeanne feels like doing. She’s carried along like a leaf in the wind, and neither the leaf nor the wind prove to be particularly interesting.

Chabrol spends some time accumulating details of the comfortable existence the Lelievre family enjoys, but he never makes anything of the class contrast between them and Jeanne and Sophie, and he never connects any of it to the central conceit of the story, Sophie’s illiteracy, so both the class contrast and her illiteracy wind up just hanging in the air doing nothing. (If Sophie’s inability to read had actually posed any real danger to her, she might have at least become a somewhat more sympathetic character despite her aloofness, but as it stands, it’s clear that the Lelievres not only wouldn’t have fired her, they’d have been more than happy to pay for reading lessons.)  And then, at last, Sophie and Jeanne conduct the murderous ceremony of the title, but it means nothing and arouses no feelings whatsoever because it’s completely arbitrary and has no connection whatsoever to either Sophie’s inability to read or any kind of conflict, class or otherwise, between Sophie and the Lelievres.

There’s a very nice ironic plot twist at the very end, but it’s too bad it was wasted on this dud of a movie. There’s a lot of Chabrol I haven’t seen, but if you want a much better introduction to his work, check out The Bridesmaid. That actually has a point.