La cérémonie (1995, Claude Chabrol) with Girish Shambu - Criterion Spine #1199

"It's an incredibly rich film."

In this episode of Why This Film?, I'm joined by film critic and scholar Girish Shambu to explore La cérémonie, Claude Chabrol's 1995 masterpiece and Criterion Collection Spine #1199.

La cérémonie follows Sophie, a withdrawn live-in maid hired by the welcoming Lelièvre family at their country estate. The family is pleasant. The job is fine. And then Sophie meets Jeanne, the local postmistress. Jeanne is sharp, reckless, and already on bad terms with Sophie's new employer. The two women become close. And that friendship, combined with a secret Sophie has been hiding since she arrived, sets the film on a course it can't turn back from.

Girish brings his perspective as a critic who has spent years thinking about films that take economic inequality seriously from the works of Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers, and Aki Kaurismäki. He's currently writing a book about the marginalization of women in the history of auteurism, which gives him a precise eye for how class, gender, and power operate in everyday life.

Together, we move through the film scene by scene and discuss:

• How class war can still operate through politeness and generosity
• The role secrets and shame play in shaping Sophie's identity
• How critical reception of the film has recently changed
• Chabrol as an underappreciated filmmaker of the French New Wave

Whether you're discovering La cérémonie for the first time or returning to it, this conversation explores why a film dismissed for years suddenly became recognized as one of the essential films of its era.

You can find more from Girish Shambu below:

Girish Shambu

The New Cinephilia

Hollywood ManeStays - Not a pin, not a clip. Just Better.

Transcript

Ron 0:06

Is this the best French post-war film? Hello everybody, my name is Ron, and welcome to Why This Film, the podcast where we explore the artistry, cultural impact, and legacy of movies in the Criterion Collection. Each episode, I sit down with experts in Cinephiles to ask, why was this film chosen for the collection and why is it still matter today? In this episode, we're stepping into a very quiet house, well, at least in the beginning of the film, with La Sarah Monie, Criterion Spine number 1199, the 1995 film from director Claude Chabral. Part psychological thriller, part portrait of class in France, LaSera Moni follows Sophie, a new live-in maid working for the Letebier family at their country estate. The family is pleasant, the job is fine, and then Sophie meets Jean, the local postmistress, sharp, reckless, and already on bad terms with Sophie's new employer. The two women become close, and that friendship, combined with a secret that Sophie has been hiding since she arrived, sets the film on a course it can't turn back from. My guest today is Garrus Shambu, a film critic, writer, and one of the most thoughtful Cenophiles working today. And boy, does he teach me a lot in this episode. He is the author of The New Cynophilia, a book about how the internet changed the way people watch, talk about, and argue over movies. He's written for the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, and Film Quarterly, where he was the editor of the journal's online column, Quorum. He's a professor emeritus at Kenetius University in Buffalo, New York, where he spent over 20 years teaching while building one of the most influential voices in online film criticism. He's currently working on a book about the marginalization of women in the history of altruism, which is why he's exactly the right person for La Ceremonie, a film Chabral himself called The Last Marxist Film. And with that, here's my conversation with Gira Shambu. When you suggested this film to me, I'd never heard of it. Yeah. So that was a lot of fun. I think I said in an email to you, I'm excited to actually watch this for the first time. That's great. Yeah, you did. That's great. Why did you so without stepping on your final answer at the end, I left it wide open for you. You could pick any film that you wanted. Why did you pick this of all the options that you have?

SPEAKER_00 2:07

There's a couple of couple of different reasons. One of them is Chabrol, I see as the least appreciated member of the New Wave. My earliest loves in the New Wave were like Truffaut and Godard and Romer, all of these filmmakers. But for the last decade, Chabrol is my favorite New Wave filmmaker because I have a great love of narrative cinema, genre cinema, popular cinema. And he's so good at making popular films and genres, but also making them artful and socially critical. And there's many other things I love about him. I I won't say all of those things here. But so firstly, because he's the least appreciated member and I wanted to like send him my love and send him some Cinefy love. The other reason is I'm really big on reading film criticism. Like every time I watch a film, the next day, the first thing I do is go to Letterboxd, Google the film, see what other people have said about it. Because sometimes I'm not even sure exactly what I think until I'm able to like hear other people's perspectives. So I find critical reception to be like a super important area of film culture. And so that's why I'm like kind of writing about film criticism because I love reading film criticism. And the critical reception on La Ceremonie has been amazing in the last 30 years. Those are kind of the two big reasons he's so underappreciated and the critical reception, the journey of the critical reception of this film has been so interesting and so strong.

Ron 3:29

Sarah Weinman wrote the essay for this release, and she said in her essay to watch a Shabral film is to feel your mind bend slowly, slowly then all at once.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Yeah.

Ron 3:39

And I feel like that pretty much sums up the ceremony.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

True.

Ron 3:43

Because again, I was going in completely blind. Yeah. So I'm sitting and wondering, is something going to happen? And you don't realize that things are happening the whole way through. Exactly. You just may not realize exactly what for. Exactly. Sandrine Bonaire and Isabel Au Pair, they are two of the best French actresses of their generation, some could argue. And here we have them in the same film, and they are quite a force. What do these two together bring to this film? That's a very big, loaded question.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Yeah, that's a great question. Uh so I think there there are like four excellent French kind of actresses in this film. This film is like an actress, a feast of great performing women. I just I think that Hopper and Bonaire come from slight two slightly different j generations, two slightly uh different places in time. So Hopper makes her debut film in the early 70s, and her career starts going in the mid to late 70s. And she's made seven films with Chabrol. Chabrol is a huge fan of hers, and they often talk about how they have instant communication, no direction is needed. And with Bonaire, she comes, she's slightly later, starting in the 80s. And she's known especially for her film with uh Varda, Vagabond, and Maurice Piola, uh no Samur. But they're both incredibly well-reputed actresses, and I think each of them brings her own physical presence to the character, and the characters are so radically different. And I'm sure we're gonna talk about that, how those two characters are not collapsed into one category like working women. They're each their own person.

Ron 5:14

Yeah, Uper, there's a lot of the behind-the-scenes making of this film on this Criterion release, and you can tell they have worked together before the director and the actress. It's very interesting to me to see that collaboration and how he's saying, just trust me.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

I think there's an interview she does on that uh on that disc where she says, somebody asks her, so were you sent the script? And then did you like the script? And is that why you signed up? And she said, No, I never read the script. Chabrol called me, and of course, I I said yes. She's worked with she had worked with Kadar uh earlier in her career.

Ron 5:44

She's made a career, and of course, I that when I was first starting to get into this, I watched the piano teacher and I didn't know what I was getting myself into there. I'm learning she's making a career out of playing women who do some disturbing things. Does her character Gene fit into this pattern of characters that she's played, or is is Jean something different?

SPEAKER_00 6:05

I would say that Oopair is so incredibly versatile that she's played a wide variety of roles: comedies, tragedies, melodramas, thrillers, uh difficult art films. So this just felt like a fantastic performance because you don't exactly know what the character is going to say or do. And Bong Jun-ho has a really nice interview on this Criterion disc where he says that he loved uh Hupper's ceaselessly unstable physical presence in this film. And that was a very good way to describe it because you never quite know what she's gonna do or say next. And so I think Chabrol really kind of taps into her ability to do that. Chabrol's called this the last Marxist film.

Ron 6:49

Can you help me unpack what he means by that? No, that's funny. That's uh So you're laughing. I I ask a question and you laugh at me.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

No, no, I'm I'm I'm laughing because Chabrol himself kind of I always, whenever I picture his face, it always kind of has an impish, kind of mischievous smile to it. And this is again one of his kind of jokes. In passing to Huppert, he just happened to say, you know what, this is the last Marxist film. And when pressed on it later, he said that when the Berlin Wall fell, he read in a newspaper, in a French newspaper, I think it was La Figaro, where he read, Well, the Berlin Wall is down, so the class struggle is over. You know, he he somebody wrote this and he thought that was the most ridiculous thing. He said, only an upper class person would think this way. The class struggle is still very much alive for everyone who's not an upper class person. And so that's why he said, I had to say something a little bit provocative about this film and make a film that could be seen as a class war film, which this is. And um, that's why he kind of called that the last Marxist film, to call attention to the fact that the class war is very much alive. And if anything, the class war is even more pronounced today than in 1995 when he said that.

Ron 7:59

It's really interesting to call this a film about so the class war. That's that might be a little extreme, but I mean it does end on an extreme note. I've watched it multiple times now, and I don't feel like the family in the film are bad people. They don't really treat Sophie cruelly. I mean, uh, there's little things that happen throughout the film that you think they have an air about them, but I never found them as cruel. They seem warm, they offer to help her with her eyesight that she lies about. They offer her driving lessons, they offer to do a lot for somebody that they met a week ago. In most movies about class, they give you a villain, someone that we can get angry with, but Chabral doesn't. I know this is based off of a story. Right. Right. How does it sit with you that like were you look I was looking for someone to blame for for what happens in the film? Were you in a similar spot or are you coming from a different perspective of I know what's going on here?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

No, uh I actually I saw I think I saw this film a long time ago, and the ending did shock me the first time. But then once you put it in context with his other work, it's maybe not quite so shocking. So, so to answer this question, it's a very good question. Um, maybe I could like invoke a different film that is about class struggle or about class, a classic of French cinema, which Chabrol and all the French New Wave critics and filmmakers loved Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, this classic French film from 1939. And that film is often cited as like a classic of humanism. And there's a particular line in that film, a line of dialogue that film critics have quoted over and over again for like a hundred years or 80 years. And that line is when a character says, everyone has their reasons. So everyone has their reasons for acting in a certain way, respect those reasons. That's kind of the subtext of that line. So that's so humanist, meaning putting the human at the center of all your analysis. So you've got a human, that human has individuality, they have autonomy, they have agency. But then the opposite worldview to that would be like anti-humanism or a non-humanism, which would say, actually, it's not the human that should be the center of all analysis. It should be systems and structures that form humans and the way they are. So, like class, gender, race, these are all systems which then produce the kinds of humans we have and produce the kinds of experiences we have in the world. So I find this film to be very boldly anti-humanist in the end. Like the climax, I find it to be very anti-humanist in the sense that it's looking at structures. Like ultimately, at the end of the day, you can be really, really, really nice to people who work for you, but you still belong in a different class than they do. That class barrier cannot be breached. That's intimately connected to the amount of money you have, the kind of upbringing you you had, the kind of labor you do. So, so to me, uh the film itself is humanist. Like it, the characters, there's no one who you totally dislike during most of the film. But then at the end, it suddenly turns to an anti-humanist film and says structures are more important than individual people.

Ron 11:09

This is why I'm so happy this podcast exists, Girish. I have to tell you. That's so good. No way could I ever come up with you what you just said.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Okay. No, no, no.

Ron 11:17

You're too modest. Bong Jun-ho, he did say there's a quote, he does a long interview on the release, and he says, the scariest part is that this bourgeois family of four that gets massacred at the end hasn't done anything significantly wrong. Obviously, that's like a lightning bolt hitting me. Look at the end of Parasite. There's a family who doesn't necessarily do anything wrong, but there's small misgivings throughout the film. And in the end of that film, the thing that sets the character off that ends up murdering one of the family is he stinks, and the the patriarch of the family holds his nose. And that's just a build of all these small things that lead to a tragic end for some characters. So you can clearly see those parallels.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

It's great. That that Bong interview is, I think it's only like 10 or 12 minutes long, but it is so good. And I I especially love the one comment he makes. He says, you know, Hitchcock was a big influence on Chabrol. And then he says something amazing. He says, There are sort of two kinds of filmmakers who were influenced by Hitchcock. I'm sure there are many kinds, but he especially talks about two kinds. And he makes a distinction between Brian De Palma and Claude Chabrol. And he says, Brian de Palma is like a rich, greasy meal. Like it's very rich, it's very satisfying. And you know, it's almost too much, but it's very pleasurable. Chabrol is like a dry, brittle pastry that leaves a little sharp aftertaste. And that is so bang on. That is so perfect.

Ron 12:43

Really selling the Chabral film to all those listening. True. So are you ready to jump into the to the film itself here? Definitely. Sophie, played by Sandrine Bonaire, meets Catherine Lebier. And I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but it was my best shot. That's played by Jacqueline Bissett, who we've not spoken about yet. They're meeting at a cafe to interview for the Liban position as a maid at the family's estate. And this is a blink and you you miss it moment that buries the film's secret. In the first shot of the film is Sophie goes to walk into the wrong place. She's across the street walking into a building and has to stop and ask someone where something is. And I didn't catch that at first, obviously, because you don't know what the big secret is with her just yet. You know, she's trying to hide that she is illiterate. And Chabral hides it with her just really casually. And the whole movie keeps that secret in that way where everything's just under the surface. Does hiding that in plain sight change the effect of the reveal for you? And the reveal is not something that happens at the end, which then sparks the violence. It actually happens in the first third of the film, which I find interesting too. There was a question in there somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

That's that's perfectly fine. I'm invoking Hitchcock here because um Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a wonderful essay on this film, and he talks about Schabroll being profoundly influenced by both Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. And Schabroll himself in interviews has talked extensively about Hitchcock. And um, Schabroll wrote the first book on Alfred Hitchcock with Eric Romer in the 50s, and so he knows his body of work really well. And so Hitchcock always believed that you shouldn't have a who-done it that only reveals the murder or whatever, the criminal at the very end. You should you should do that earlier on so that the audience is freed up. The audience is not constantly trying to guess and look for who the criminal is. They're freed up to actually enjoy the entire film and everything else that Hitchcock is doing. So I think there's something of that here that he wants to like show you the secret early so there's no big secret. Although at the end, you know, we are smacked with a big surprise at the very end without our realizing it. So see, yeah, so I would say that I think he he does do that earlier in order to kind of free up the audience to engage more fully with the film.

Ron 14:51

There's another, not I hate to say funny, but it is kind of funny looking back on it, when she hands Catherine the reference letter and points to this is the phone number and address. Any literate person can see that is a phone number and that dress. She also doesn't seem to know the days of the week. Yeah. Which is that they they slide that that in there. A few scenes later, she isn't on the right track with the train, presumably because she can't read the schedule. So, how long has she been standing there? So now on a second watch, you have all these other questions that come flying in at you. And it's it's not like I get it now. It's no like how long has she been standing there? When did that train come in? Did she ever leave? Like, I there's so many different questions that it invokes then. And I love films that reward a second or or third watch.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Yeah. You know, another take on that could be also an additional take when you're kind of disadvantaged in some way. We see this in the world with groups who are marginalized. You have to work harder in order to achieve the same outcomes because there are systems of exclusion that exist in the world. And so I can imagine a disabled person like her, like leaving home earlier, making sure that she does everything possible to get there on time, just in case she might miss a cue and and uh and be late. And so she doesn't want to do that. So it's possible. She does say she took an earlier train. So it could also be that she wants to make sure she's there on time because she knows she has a disability and that might affect her negatively.

Ron 16:17

And she does. So someone that obviously is illiterate is at a major disadvantage just in life in general, but she turns the tables on Catherine in the interview because Catherine almost assumes, like, oh, she's taking this job, and she throws the salary at her. You know, I got paid this much at my last job. And it was a power shift in that conversation. Am I giving Sophie too much credit for for evaluating Catherine and seeing what she can get away with? Can she hide in this household? Can I get more money? Am I giving that character too much credit?

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Uh no, no. I think I think there's something about Sophie's character. I see her as a very self-possessed woman. And Sandrine Polar does a really good job of kind of using her body to express this. And so uh she thinks that she's worth at least as much as she got paid before, probably more. And she just says it, and this is in line with the directness that we see her that she uses to communicate with her employers all through the film. Often in the film, when she's asked to do something, she doesn't say, I'll do it, or I agree. She doesn't say something uh that would be a little bit warm. She'll often say j'ai compris, like I understand, I understand, I know, I understand. So, in a way that's a little bit standoffish, but at the same time, it also signals the class barrier between employer and employee. The employee doesn't have to say, yeah, I'm pleased to do that. I'm happy to do that. No, all they have to say is, I understand, I'll do it. I'm a laborer, and fine, I'll do it. Yeah. So I I love that brisk kind of directness, and that that goes hand in hand with her like sense of self-possession.

Ron 17:51

I thought that was just a French thing.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

It could also be a French thing.

Ron 17:56

I thought for sure that was just a Bonaire plays her very still. And when we start talking about Jean here very soon, I'm almost more afraid of Bonaire's character of Sophie because of the stillness and the quietness. And you're not really sure what she's thinking. She doesn't show a lot of emotion. I find there's something simmering, which I find a little more scary.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think part of that could be coming from a place of extreme guardedness. And of course, she does, she does have something to guard, and a scandalous secret in in today's society to be illiterate. And I just wanted to go back quickly to what you said earlier about Shabrol uh telling us within the first third of the film that she's illiterate, is the the original. Let's talk about the source material for just a second. The original is a novel by British novelist Ruth Rendell. And Chabrol made another film called The Bridesmaid, a wonderful film from the 2000s. It was also based on a Ruth Randell novel. And the Ruth Rendell novel came out in the late 70s, and this movie is from 1995. And the name of that novel was A Judgment in Stone. And he changed the title to La Ceremonie. When that novel was translated into French, and he read it in the French translation, the French uh title is something like La La Like I I don't want to pronounce and murder the French here, but it's something like The Illiterate Person, like the Illiterate is the name of the. So he the book gives away that aspect right in the title. And so I think that's why he didn't want to like leave that as a surprise to Leanne, because Ruth Randell wrote popular mystery novels that were probably read by thousands of people in France, so they would probably already know the plot and know the title of the novel. So that's one of the reasons why he did it. But but to go back to your question, sorry for that little detour. No, no, that's great. So I think it's her guardedness about her disability that that kind of keeps her from expressing too much. She wants complete control over every single thing she expresses, every facial expression, every word that comes out of her mouth. So I think that comes from a it's it's strongly motivated, I would say.

Ron 20:05

I want to talk about television because the TV plays a huge it's always prominent. Before Sophie arrives, we're introduced to the television that the family has this new TV or someone's setting up the satellite dish, I think, when she arrives. Can you help me understand what Cabral's telling us with Sophie's why when she watches TV, she's sitting on the floor in front of her bed upstairs and she's watching there's a point where she's watching, I wrote a like a twisted version of the Muppets. I don't know what that is. If I grew up in France, I'd probably know what that is. But the Leviers are, they're always watching things of high society. They're watching opera. Can you help me understand what Cabral is telling us with just television in general and the differences between what those two parties are consuming?

SPEAKER_00 20:48

That's exactly it's it's it's exactly what you just analyzed, uh, which you which you just uh hit on. So the television is highly coded. Uh they both have TVs. She has an older, slightly crappier TV than they do. And uh they watched kind of high culture things. And this is there's a wonderful joke in the film, a quiet joke, which is that the mother watches a film with the son and she says, Oh, this is a really good film, you know. I I want to watch it with you. And it turns out it's it's a film by Chabrol. I love it. It's actually a very good film by Chabrol called Wedding and Blood that he made in the early 70s. And so clearly Chabrol aligning himself with the bourgeoisie because he's a filmmaker who makes films for bourgeois people, not for working class people. He's open about it. And he's often also said himself that he's not a Marxist himself. He's he sees himself as a bourgeois person, but then he's but he's also a socially critical artist. You can you you can do that from the inside. And so he's always said that that's what he does. And she watches game shows, talk shows, Muppet rap, the whatever the. I had no idea what I was about to look that up. I know French Muppet Rap. I have to Google that. Yeah. And also the fact that she doesn't have access to words gives her like a Special kind of the images have a special hold over her. When she walks into that room for the first time, and as soon as her employer leaves, as soon as Catherine leaves, she closes the door and she turns on the TV just to make sure it's working, see, see how it is, see what the image looks like. And often when she sits down, it's a very different way of interacting with the television than like the more than the bourgeois family does downstairs. Not to reveal too much about the ending, but at the ending, they dress up, you know, in tuxedos and formal dress to watch an opera on television, which is in itself a little bit ridiculous. But she's completely enthralled by the television. And she's just like, she's just intoxicated by those images. And so I think it has something to do with compensating for her like lack of literacy. One could one could read it that way too.

Ron 22:46

Yeah. And it's also another, it's a way that her and Gene will bond, as we see later. When Catherine's showing Sophie around the home, a word caught my attention, is when Catherine calls the kitchen her domain. And it is, it's her space, but it's also, I don't know if it's meant to be this is where you belong. The rest of the house isn't yours. Did you read that as a boundary?

SPEAKER_00 23:08

Definitely. You're you're absolutely right. In fact, Shabrol himself talks about the boundary there between like Sophie's domain and the family's domain. And uh Shabrol, very much influenced by Fritz Long in many of his movies. And Long has always been thought of as like an objective filmmaker, like almost diagrammatic. He wants to like lay out cities, layout spaces, layout systems. And uh he Shabrol does that in this film during that tour scene where you clearly see the kitchen. You see the kitchen, the passageway, which kind of connects the two domains, and then you see the stairs that go up to Sophie's room. And so the dining room, the kitchen, there's certain rooms that belong to Sophie that she can feel comfortable in. But there are other rooms in which, you know, she's not really meant to be very much unless she's cleaning them or something. So, like the living room, the library, etc. So he marks that boundary very clearly. And Chabrol said somewhere, I can't remember where, he talks about putting a mirror right in the right in the passageway between the near the passageway between the two domains, so that at any sh at any point you can tell who is coming from the other domain into this space. And so there are some shots you see reflected in the mirror. So you can already tell like a domain being or a border being kind of breached or somebody crossing a border. So Chabrol himself is very conscious of this border. That's why I can never make a film. That's just that's just very smart crafting of film. The tour is also interesting. She's shown the dining room, and then she's shown the living room. She enters the living room with Catherine. Then Catherine takes her to the library, which is a separate room, and Catherine enters that room, but Sophie stands at the threshold and does not enter this room because it's a room full of books that she can't read. And so it's it's so clear there that she she knows that she doesn't belong in there. It's almost a scary kind of space, and she's afraid to enter that space. But she does enter that space with John later because John is extremely excited by the by the library, and she said, Oh, I love to read and I love to use my spare time at the post office reading, and she wants to borrow a book, you know? So that's when she's feels comfortable entering the room, is with someone who is a class ally with her, Sean.

Ron 25:21

I find it fascinating that Tabral made a film about a sympathetic, lower class, illiterate woman who then becomes the villain of the story, of how he flips it. He's not giving us a true villain. You could go through an hour of this film and not know where we're headed. Because the family is so genuinely pleasant in some respects. We spoke earlier about their generosity, which interestingly enough becomes their downfall. The first domino to fall is later in the film when Melinda puts the sunglasses on, thinking they're reading glasses or corrective lenses for Sophie. But the only reason that she has those is because the family offered to schedule her an eye appointment. In fact, they drop her off at the eye appointment. I there's like those kind of things make me think this family is actually super kind, like kinder than I would have expected in a film that's supposedly about divides in class.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I would say that the first time someone watches this film, one is more likely to feel that way. But after you see the film play out and you watch it a second time, I had the experience of so many things that the family says or does is just patronizing, condescending, and also self-serving. Like, for example, their insistence. In fact, we should probably have a small little talk here, but all the ways in which they do this behavior. Right at the beginning, when she during the interview, uh, she says she doesn't want tea or she doesn't want anything, and Catherine says, I insist. And then she orders her tea that she doesn't even want. So kind of overrides her will right there.

Ron 26:56

So within the first 60 seconds of the film, we're gonna exit with it right away.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Right away, you know the dynamic. And then later, um another condescending part is where uh one of them refers, uses like an unpolitically correct term in French to refer to a servant. I think it's like bon or bon domestique.

Ron 27:15

Melinda corrects them, I think.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Melinda corrects them. And so Melinda, superficially shown to be slightly more politically correct, progressive than they are. It's like, wait a second, you know, don't use that word. That's not nice.

Ron 27:28

But in the end, in the son's question, what's his question? His attractive exactly that's all he cares about.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Yeah, actually he says, I hope she's not ugly, is what he says. Yeah, that's even worse somehow. I know, I know. And and and the father defends the son because he says, the father says something like, Don't blame this, don't blame this kid for wanting pretty things or wanting to see pretty things.

Ron 27:48

All right, you're convincing me.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

I don't like those people. So there are all these small little details that kind of add up to something bigger. And also their investment in paying for the glasses, paying for the vision test, paying for the driving lessons is all about she will do her job better and then serve them better. So it's about her, they improving her job performance. So to me, I see it as kind of self-serving.

Ron 28:14

Let's not forget whenever is it Jean? Jeanne? I don't know how to pronounce that correctly. Jean. She helps get Melinda's car started. Jean hands her a tissue to wipe her hands, and Melinda wipes it and almost throws it right, almost hits her in the face. She throws that tissue back into the car. Right. And I thought, oh man, you were supposed to be the one that we were believing could like that that had that progressive mentality on class. And here you are throwing a used, dirty tissue back at somebody. What the hell's the matter with you?

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Exactly. And it almost makes you want to read her like earlier attempts at defending Sophie as like a kind of virtue signaling, or I'm more liberal than you, or more progressive than you, when in reality she's just part of the same family with the same uh drawbacks and flaws.

Ron 29:00

I didn't realize that the actor who plays George is Jean-Pierre Cassell, who's Vincent Cassell's father. And I I really enjoy his performance. The two stars obviously stand out more than any, in my opinion, but I love Jean-Pierre Cassell's performance in this film as well.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

He's great. He's he's a seasoned actor, and many people, uh, there's a lot of argument about the best periods of Chabrol. Chabrol had such a long career. Uh, he made more than 55 films, and there's a lot of uneven films in there. Films he made, he said, he's talked about this, films he made just so he could make a living, just so he could practice his craft, even if it's crap. And he made a bunch of spy films in the 60s and the late 60s that are considered to be abysmal. I'm a huge Chabrol fan, and I I haven't watched those because I've heard so many bad things about them. But then he had a wonderful period in the late 60s to early 70s where he made all these domestic kind of thrillers and domestic melodramas. And Cassel is in one of those films, and he's terrific. It's a film called The Rupture from like 1970, so 25 years before La Ceremony. So he's worked with Chabrol and he's had a long career, a seasoned actor, and you're right, he gave a great performance.

Ron 30:12

So you just describe Chabral as like the French director version of Nicolas Cage. Right, exactly, exactly. Sophie and John meet, she asks for a ride. You could see her staring at Sophie a bit in the car. She's in the backseat. She seems very intrigued by this person. She comes over when the Lebieres are out. They're on holiday, I believe. So they're all gone. And John is just going through their things. And she tells this story about how she knew Catherine, the matriarch of the family, in the past. She tells a story about how they were both in a modeling competition of some kind. Is this where the resentment of her comes from?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Yeah. I read somewhere that I haven't actually read the novel myself, A Judgment in Stone by Ruth Randell. Um, but I've heard that there are several episodes in that novel where Jean kind of fantasizes and fictionalizes uh some things. So you can't always be sure she's an unreliable kind of narrator. You can't actually be sure what she experienced herself. So I got the same feeling here. It's like, was she really in this modeling contest? I'm not so sure. So it's possible, it's possible that there was some upper class girl, you know, because this happened when she was a girl, some upper class girl who won the contest and Jean didn't. And somehow uh Jean remembered that, and she identifies that upper class girl with the upper class Catherine. So class as a category becomes much more important than these people as individuals. So I can kind of read it that way too, I guess. I like that read.

Ron 31:44

We're gonna go with it. The friendship I felt truly blossoms. It's whenever Sophie is left with a grocery list and she's asked to order groceries. Jean is willing to help. She has Sophie has nowhere to turn, so she go gets into town. And uh this is, I think, when Jean sticks her chewing gum to her desk and then later just keeps chewing it. What does a detail like that show the audience about the character?

SPEAKER_00 32:10

It's great. I mean, firstly, it's just a cinematically fantastic gesture because it's so unpredictable and it's funny and it's delivered by Opper in just this inimitable way. If you actually go to the letterboxed page on this film, you will see hundreds of reviews, and many of them are just open, like fan adoration of Ooper, and they remark on the scene. And uh, here I was kind of struck by the childlike quality of that gesture. Like, like who would do that? A kid would do that. Exactly. And but also, children are also often amoral. They haven't fully been socialized into morality. Like, what is morally right, morally wrong? And sometimes children do amoral things. And so the acts at the end of this film could also be seen as a kind of gleeful explosion of amorality, even if it does have some basis in class divisions.

Ron 33:04

I've read different things about the relationship between these two female characters with Sophie and and John. And some people have read it as friendship, some read it as something closer. Are they physically and emotionally attracted to each other? What's what's your read on their they do have an attraction, whether that be magnetic or physical? I'm not entirely sure. I'm curious what your read on what attracts these two people together.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

I'm absolutely here for any and all queer readings of this film because they're they're there and they're there. They're there and we can easily go there. Although it's fascinating to see the critical reception of this film, the early critical reception does not really dwell on that or even raise it. Most of the reviews don't even raise it. Although the writer of this film, we haven't actually talked about the person who wrote the screenplay. So Chavrol hired this woman, Caroline Eliechev, to write a screenplay for this film. So he co-wrote the screenplay with her. She is a very famous psychoanalyst in France. And so she has said that it was very obvious to her that there was a kind of a gay element involved in this in their relationship. She was absolutely convinced of it and she wanted to like emphasize it in subtle ways. So I think that the queer reading has a lot of basis in this film. Also, she also looked at an earlier true crime episode from the 30s in France that was very notorious, very famous, the Papin Sisters, who both killed their employer and the employer's daughter. And there was a there was actually a great indie film from England in the 90s that was made around the time at La Ceremony. It was called Sister My Sister by woman director Nancy Meckler. It's an excellent film. But the focus of that film is mostly like the incestuous relationship between the sisters and the psychological dynamic between the sisters. So that's the focus of that film. Chaprol takes this, takes that in a different kind of more class dynamic in a different direction. So I would say uh there's an instant kind of bonding between the two. Like you said, Au Père looking very, very curiously at Sophie in the car, which is the first time she encounters her and kind of wanting to be friends, and Sandrine and I should say Sophie, trusting Jean because they belong to the same class. And so I see, I see that's why her guard is down with John, is because they belong to the same class and she's more open to her. I don't see any other reason why that would be so. They are very different people. Sophie is very guarded, very premeditated, very careful. Jean is none of those things. So they are extremely, individually extremely different people, I think.

Ron 35:40

You can see the slow unraveling starting after the birthday party. Because Sophie's asked to help with Melinda's birthday party. But she says she's committed to helping fold clothes at a local church with Jean. And you come to find out later. Maybe Jean's help isn't necessarily wanted. Melinda's boyfriend, who his name is Jeremy, he gives her the gift of a boom box for her birthday. I love when films do this and they drop items throughout the film that always come back into play a role at some point. Guns are the obvious items that we see in film all the time. That it's it's uh what's it called? Chekhov's gun. But this is like Chekhov's boom box. Nice it's a it's a benign gift. A boom box, and it's something that I didn't pay close attention to on initial watch, and it's a huge part of the ending that is coming. I just feel like that's really smart writing because it just seems like why do you even have the scene of her getting a gift that doesn't add anything other than to show that Jeremy has strong feelings toward Melinda?

unknown 36:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

I like to think that maybe I think Hitchcock sometimes used objects in that way, where ordinary everyday objects could be weaponized in some way or could be sinister or could be deployed in a sinister way. You could also say that about the fake glasses that she buys at the store, which are a very innocuous item. But then that if Melinda had not picked up those glasses, they she would still be alive.

Ron 37:07

Oh, that's an interesting way to think of it. Like, where do we go? Does it still end the same way because of the relationship between Sophie and Jean? Like, are we hurtling toward that and the glasses sped up that process?

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Well, it was the catalyst when she picks up the glasses and puts them on, and then Sophie realizes that okay, there's no going back here. She knows exactly. She she's discovered my secret that I can't read. And uh she immediately goes into defensive mode. And then the rest of the plot just follows through inexorably, like a boulder rolling down a hill.

Ron 37:41

Well, there's another we we've talked through some different things that the bourgeois family does. And this is something that Catherine says because whenever Sophie says, Oh, I volunteered to help fold clothes, she says, Do what you can for Melinda's party. But as soon as she wants ice for the party and Sophie is gone, she is appalled. Well, how could she leave? We need her here, even though she already told her, just do what you can, it's fine. Like we we understand that it's a weekend, it's supposed to be an off day for you. This is where I have in my notes we can say all we want about this family being kind, but boy, do they have an air about them.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

Exactly. I think I had an even stronger kind of response of being outraged. It's like, it's her day off. You can't ask her to do anything. Sorry. That's off limits. And she already says, I have plans, and but she's like, do what you can. Why should she? Exactly. So that that that to me was somehow taking advantage of her and then being completely outraged that she wasn't around. She had she completely forgot that conversation in the car. And so her response was typically kind of entitled rich person response.

Ron 38:46

Very stereotypical rich person response there.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Exactly.

Ron 38:49

The next scene, whenever Sophie and Jean are in her apartment and she's cooking the mushrooms that she had foraged. This is the hinge of the film, in my opinion. Curious your take. But before this scene, you you have a sense of these two women. But after the scene, and it is a long one-shot here, which is just beautiful because they are the two actresses are in the in the frame together throughout the entire one-shot, except for a few seconds. But even when it's focused on Jean, we get Sophie's reflection in a mirror. And it p she walks back over to the table. So uh before the scene, I didn't feel like I had a good sense of of who these women were, but the picture is getting clearer now because they are confessing to each other. Jean finds a newspaper and shows it to Sophie, basically says, I know who you are, and it's revealed that Sophie's father passed away in a house fire. And Sophie's picture is there showing that she was acquitted of wrongdoing. This is after Sophie confronts Jean saying, I know your daughter died and you were accused of killing her. And Jean tells the story of how she's walking in the home and feels something on her leg and kicks the thing that's on her leg, leaves the room, returns to the room, and finds that her daughter has been injured. That's a ridiculous story.

SPEAKER_00 40:10

Can we start with that of how ridiculous of a story that is? I think Chabrol has spoken, and the actresses have also spoken, about how Chabrol left it up to them to determine whether they the these stories were true or not. And they uh Sandrine Bonnet and Isabelle Au Pair got together and said, let's talk about this and let's see which story is true, which story is not true. And I think what they ended up with was that Isabel Au Pair's character, Jean, uh, did not kill her baby. It was an accident, but Sophie intentionally did kill her dad. So these stories, as ridiculous as they are, there was some kind of logic that the actresses used to work out amongst themselves which of these is true, which of these is false, because Chabrol kind of refused to give them direction on this. And I really like the openness of this very important plot point that Chabrol said, you know, he didn't say it to work it out, but he gave them freedom to work it out.

Ron 41:04

If there was a magnet between the two, it was slowly getting together, slowly, slowly. And then this is the scene where they are just slammed together and intertwined through the rest because now they found someone else that they can confide in and tell the truth. So what gets me that makes me afraid of both of these women is their reaction is laughter, saying, well, they couldn't prove anything for either of them. Not the reaction I expect when you're speaking about a dead child and a dead parent.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Yeah. I think what I like about this is that even though this film, I see this film as a film about about class and class struggle and class warfare, Chabrol refuses to romanticize the working class. And he's absolutely comfortable with creating these two highly flawed, highly imperfect, even psychotic characters, but making them also somehow very magnetic and people that you want to engage with. And I read somewhere that the Ruth Rendell characters in the novel are actually very unlike these two characters in the film, in that they are older, they are not very likable at all, and just distasteful people, the way they come off the page. And Chabrol completely wanted to subvert that, cast like two magnetic, charismatic, attractive, beautiful people in these roles, make them younger, and then infuse them with these psychotic elements. So I kind of like the kind of games that he's playing here with casting. Is the laughter a relief from both women that they can confide in someone else about their secrets?

Ron 42:31

I think that's a good that's a good theory. You know? I hope it is. Otherwise, it is maniacal laughter of, hey, we got away with it, they couldn't prove anything. So I think that's the better half. That's the angel on my shoulder saying this is relief, not mania.

SPEAKER_00 42:46

Yeah. Um, I tend to have enough sympathy for these two characters that I would lean towards that interpretation too.

Ron 42:53

Yeah, I don't I what's it say about us as people that I also sympathize with the people that will end up murdering an entire family here in a few scenes?

SPEAKER_00 43:02

I think we're meant to. I mean, I think we'd be monsters if we if we weren't drawn to those people. Uh, they're cultured, smart people, but they're also jerks. And I kind of like the way he brings out both of those things.

Ron 43:15

George has could has complained constantly about Jean opening his mail, and we we see the apex of that frustration because he goes to the post office and accuses her of opening his mail. She pushes back almost very calmly, not almost, she does push back calmly and say how his first wife had committed suicide, and he called his current wife Catherine a whore. This invokes George to physically slap her. And the reaction is incredible because there is not a reaction. Did this change how you felt about the character at all after you saw the hard slap across the face and she had no reaction other than to look at the other people in the room and say, Hey, did you see that?

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yeah. I think I gave the character enough room to React in that way that wasn't immediately legible to me. And I often find that characters in Chabrol surprise me and also remain opaque to me at various moments. And I kind of like that because I don't want the character to become somebody that I can take every action and say, yeah, I can see why they did that. Sometimes I should not be able to see because that's how it is with people, I think. You know, there are a lot of things we do that are opaque to most other people, even to the people closest to us. And Shabrol himself has spoken about this quality of opaqueness, opacity, he calls it. And uh people have written about essays about opacity in Chibrol. And it kind of does make sense to me. And Chibrol also hates psychological realism. He doesn't want a character's actions to be explained by psychological motivations, because then it just becomes a game. You lay out enough motivations, and then the viewer simply connects the motivations to the actions and goes, hey, look, I made this connection and now I've made this film whole. I've made this character whole. And he doesn't want you to do that. He wants you to like suspend your understanding of a character where you're not totally sure what that person is like why a person is doing what he what they're doing. So this is this was one of those moments I'm like, hey, that's surprising, but okay.

Ron 45:09

Yeah, the motivations for these characters are not clear. So George calls Sophie for an important file in the next scene, and to combat the idea that she can't read, she goes, she just hangs up the phone. And my thought was just open the door and let the driver in and let him find the file. I understand it's a movie, and the mechanics of the movie is we have to move the plot forward. But then I started thinking this is might not be an accident because Chabral doesn't do things by accident. Is Sophie ready to be done with this family at this point? And just, or is she feeling that level of stress of I'm I can't hide this anymore? I'm retreating to my safe space, which is to turn on my uh mutant form of the Muppets, whatever that is. I'm gonna feel bad if anyone listens to this in France and says, No, I watched this my whole childhood. How dare you call them that? But it's starting, it's really starting to unravel now. And I had a note of like, just let the driver in and let him find the file himself.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

Right. Right. I would simply say that it's it's an extension of Sophie's guarded personality that when she's when when she reaches a certain threshold where she can't handle it, just like shuts it off. She's already kind of a closed-off person in many ways, at least to to her employers, not to Jean, but even to Jean. She's quite closed off. And at one point, Jean complains to Sophie that she doesn't disclose enough things from her own life. She's like, I want to get you, I want to get to know you more. Or you never say anything about yourself or your past. She complains to Sophie, you know, friends should do that. Uh, she certainly does. Jean certainly says a lot about her. She's not afraid to share. Yeah, she's not afraid to share. Um, so I think that was just like a survival instinct moment colliding with her extremely guarded nature at that point. And maybe unconsciously she knows, like you were saying, that this job, okay, it can't last too long now because they're gonna be on to me.

Ron 46:47

Everyone seems to have secrets in this film, and I clocked it on my latest watch. It's whenever Jean comes over and sits with Sophie on the ground to watch TV. And downstairs, I believe it's this is when Catherine and uh her son are or not, wait, let me think. Is it her son? It's her son. And it and George is Melinda's father. So it's a it's a mixed family, which we didn't touch on that dynamic either. But I noticed that the son was blowing smoke rings when he was smoking a cigarette. You don't do that if you if that's your first cigarette because he's told you can't smoke, you can't start smoking. He's obviously been smoking for a while, if you're blowing smoke smoke rings. Melinda, we find out in the next scene, is pregnant. George's ex-wife, if that's true what John said, how she met her demise. If it's true what she said about Catherine, Catherine may be an adulteress. I don't know. I'm trying to make connections of what if everybody has secrets in this film or not. We obviously know what Sophie and John's secrets are. Is is Chabral trying to tell us that all of these people have secrets? Am I going like way too far in the analysis of what I'm seeing?

SPEAKER_00 47:49

No, no. I think this is a compelling case you make here. I think they do all have secrets, every single one of them. There's one thing that Catherine says that makes me doubt whether she's having affairs with other other men. Because at one point she says, I don't know if I can keep secrets like that from George. And then she reveals something to George. And that was a relatively minor matter. And so I don't think, yeah, I think that's just Jean, one of Jean's fantasies, you know, and there are a few others. So it it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be unusual for her to to kind of fictionalize this.

Ron 48:21

I don't like that you poked a hole in my everyone has a seat.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

No, I think I think it I think it holds almost uniformly. But you know what? Chabrill would not want a theory to hold uniformly across all his characters. Okay.

Ron 48:34

And then we're back to it being true now, and it's all but one. You'd want to leave something kind of suspended and uncertain. I like that. In the span of a few seconds there, the pendulum swung multiple times in all kinds of different directions. I can't get that image of them sitting on the floor with their arms around each other watching television. That's a great image. Probably one of the best images in the film. And I think that's where you because if I'm I I don't know. I have friends here to watch movies sometimes. We don't sit arm in arm. Maybe that's where I notice the queer coding of of the film, or maybe it's just meant to be that these people are now intertwined until death, do them part.

SPEAKER_00 49:11

I think that could be that's a very good and likely theory there. I would also say some of this is cultural. Like when I was growing up in India, it was actually very common for me to with to sit with my male friends at parties, etc., and be just like Isabel Lupaire and Sandrine Bonnet, hand in hand or hand around each other's waist or shoulders. The family doesn't sit that way. That's true.

Ron 49:34

They're next to each other, but they're not in any type of embrace.

SPEAKER_00 49:38

No, that's true. I did remember one shot. I was a bit startled by the shot. She uh Melinda's walking and George is sitting on the couch. And as she's walking, he grabs her by the waist and brings her down. I think she's either sits in his lap or right next to him. I can't remember exactly when, but that was an incredibly intimate moment. And they look at each other like very, very close, like just a couple of inches apart, and they share a very intimate moment, which of course they should, they're father and daughter, but at the on the other hand, it also feels slightly, slightly cringy. I'm trying to think of when that is because oh I you know what?

Ron 50:11

The thing that the thing that Catherine can't tell George is that her son Giles goes to get something and he sees John and Sophie going up the stairs. He shares that with Catherine, and Catherine says, Well, I have to tell George because I can't keep things from him. It's even something so small. Because George George's reaction then is to tell Sophie that she cannot have John in the home any longer. But he can't control what she does in her personal life. And this is when Sophie drops that plate in the kitchen. Yeah, right. Is that is that her first time showing open defiance? You mentioned before that she would her response to directives would be to say, I understand. Her response to this directive from her employer, whose house she lives in, is to smash a plate on the ground, I assume purposefully.

SPEAKER_00 50:57

Yeah. In the past, she's done some passive aggressive things, like slam the phone down, etc. But you're right, this is the first open, and I love how Chabrol shows you a shot of her with the plate in her hand. He doesn't actually show you, show her throwing the plate. The next shot he shows you is the plate itself on falling on the ground, and then she goes, Look what you made me do.

Ron 51:18

Right. But it's like what a child would say. I know. It's not an adult having a conversation of, okay, well, can she come over when you aren't home? This is my friend. I would like to watch television. Jean doesn't have a television. I'd like to sit and watch television with my friend. It's not an adult reaction, it's a reaction of a child. Totally. It's really interesting. See, all these things are coming to light now that we're having a conversation. Uh the next scene is where we have the secret is exposed. Right. And Sophie eavesdrops on a cover, which is really interesting to me that Sophie, why is Sophie going and eavesdropping on Melinda? She has her own secret and she's trying to listen in. There's no reason for her to listen in on Melinda. But anyway, maybe I'm wrong. Melinda is having a conversation with her boyfriend Jeremy that she thinks she may be with child. And through a series of conversations over a magazine, Melinda discovers that Sophie is illiterate. Melissa puts the sunglasses on thinking they are glasses. She does it playfully. And this is just good storytelling of a plant of the glasses, and then we get the payoff of those same glasses outing her. And everything changes here because Melinda offers again to help her. We can hire someone to. I I know, but but see, see, now you're making me think because Melinda at first seems like it's a caring response. But then when she says, I've heard about people like you or people like this, it's like, oh my God, you were so sensitive and you ruined it. Could you ruin it? You were doing so good, Melinda. But it doesn't seem like Sophie really wants to hear it anyway, regardless of the condescending comment that comes later.

SPEAKER_00 52:48

Yeah. I mean, it's clear also, maybe, that there have been other attempts to get her to kind of be get her to learn how to read and write. And it's partly because of her reluctance that she's now a woman in her 30s who doesn't know how to read and write. So it's also her own like extreme defensiveness, guardedness that has contributed to her kind of staying this way.

Ron 53:11

And and Sophie's reaction is to blackmail Melinda saying, you cannot tell anybody, or I will tell your father or your parents that that you are pregnant. And Melinda's obviously shocked. It's kind of a clumsy attempt by Sophie, really. It falls apart. I love that the the normal thing, I think the formula that we're used to with films and how they tell a story is that Melinda knows the secret, Sophie knows the secret, and we continue on with that tension that they know something about each other. But instead, Melinda reacts in a way that is that feels normal, is to say, I I just need I may have to tell my parents anyway. And she does. She tells her parents that she may be pregnant and how Sophie reacted to that news. And George fires her. Another, I feel like reasonable response. Do you agree or disagree that that's a reasonable, reasonable response? He offers her a room for the week. Don't list me as a reference. We don't want to say anything poor about you, but blackmail is not tolerated, so you you gotta go.

SPEAKER_00 54:12

I can I can understand that in in this specific situation. Just to go back to something you said earlier about why Sophie was listening in on the conversation. Yes, yes, please. Jean earlier had kind of chastised Sophie a little bit, saying, You don't tell me enough about your employers. What kind of goss do you have on them? And you never tell me about stuff they do. And John clearly is a very gossipy person who wants to who just wants salacious, interesting stories. She's opening mail. So she knows all the all the dirt. That's right. That's right. And so it's possible that Sophie's listening in for that reason. But there's also another reason, which is if we think about this as I like to do as a class war film, then they're they're on different sides of a battle and information can be used as a weapon, as an as a piece of advantage. And I think that's another reason. She recognizes I need to like maybe I'll have something here that I can use. Because that could be another reason. But you're right, the it just goes awry and he fires her. But I like the condescending, well, I don't like it, but uh it's interesting to it's interesting to see the condescending way in which he goes, we don't really have a contract, so I can fire you right now, but I'm gonna be a really nice guy and I'm gonna I'm gonna let you stay here for a week. So it's almost like there's no contract, which in itself is bad, but then that highlights his kindness and his largesse. And this is so typical, if you if you think about it, of like employers in the in the world today, taking on small acts as great gifts for employees. So it does resonate with me as employer behavior.

Ron 55:44

What's your take on Sophie's response, which is to not say a word? And as soon as he leaves the room, what does she do? She turns that TV back on.

SPEAKER_00 55:52

Yeah, she's just overwhelmed. And like you said, like at some point she just shuts down and escapes into this world of her television. They are too highly flawed, imperfect, and kind of life-challenged characters.

Ron 56:06

Do we know what happened with Sophie's previous job? Why I don't remember. Do we know why she left her previous job? She had a reference that she shared with Catherine at the beginning of the film. I can't remember.

SPEAKER_00 56:15

The person moved to Australia and so didn't need her anymore.

Ron 56:20

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 56:20

And so that person and Catherine did end up calling that person because she says that in the during their dinner, the fa the family dinner, and she did get a good reference. So she did call that person, got the reference, decided to hire her. It's a good thing. That was very useful. Yeah, exactly.

Ron 56:38

Thank goodness. So we are at the fatal night here. Uh the family is sitting together and they're going to watch a televised performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni. And Don Giovanni is about a nobleman who preys on his servants and gets punished for it. And Chabrol is not hiding that connection. And the whole film has been setting up this moment where the opera and the action mirror each other. Does this wink to those that are in the know of what Don Giovanni is about work for you?

SPEAKER_00 57:04

You're right. In France, Don Giovanni would be, especially among the middle classes, the bourgeois that Chabrol makes his films for, it would be widely known. So you're right. I'm sure I'm sure it's it's very intentional. I also like the the little details that make it ridiculous. Like George wears a tuxedo, even though they're going to watch it on TV in their in their own living room. Everybody gets dressed up. They pull out the damn score, which is a bilingual French-Italian score, and they put it on their laps and they follow along with the music. So I just find like a high level of like bourgeois investment in this canonical 300-year opera.

Ron 57:39

Um also recording on the boom box. They have a recording exactly. They're recording the opera onto the boom box. Yeah. So maybe they can follow along with their score at another time. I don't know. I'm not of that, I'm not of that class of society that I would. I don't think I'm pulling out the score of anything. Uh Sophie and John are returning to the house. Jean is manic when they step into the home. Like the energy level, it's already high for her as a character, and it's ratcheted up another notch. She grabs, it looks like a pump, and she's pumping this thing, and she grabs a saw, she grabs a gun as Sophie is preparing hot chocolate, I believe. They put the gun on the table. There it is again. And they go up the stairs into Catherine and George's bedroom. She's pouring cocoa all over the bed. She's also grabbing things from the closet and ripping up Catherine's clothes. So it made me think then is this upcoming violence premeditated but unspoken at this point? Because she's playing with the rifle and then she's upstairs destroying belongings. Is this a premeditated violence?

SPEAKER_00 58:40

Yeah. I tend to see it. Of course, again, this is very open, the way he kind of builds this up, stages it. I tend to see this as a kind of fr a kind of energy, a release of energy, like you were saying, she picks up random objects and is very restless and moves them around. And so I see this unlocking of energy from these, from her, especially. And then they just happen to be in that space. And very quickly, I think she sees the gun. And very quickly, I think the decision to kill the family is put into place without much premeditation. I think that the energy is already in the air. There's like a hyper feeling in the air. So I tend to, I tend to think that when they were driving up to the house, they were they did not, it did not occur to them that they were going to kill the family.

Ron 59:30

The film gives us a panning shot of the two women upstairs and the family downstairs with the opera on. It's not lost on me that our two lead actresses are finally physically above the bourgeois family here. The family sitting and watching this high culture opera. Sophie and Jean are playing with guns. The film's been tracking this divide that whole time. Opera versus trash television, fine food, and Sophie's eating the scraps at one point off of the bone. And Chabral is is, like you said, has really built up the backdrop for this ending that make it feel earned, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:05

Absolutely. It feels almost inevitable. But like once once Jean picks up the gun and starts fooling around with it in the kitchen, immediately we know how the film is gonna end.

Ron 1:00:15

So something I do that I probably shouldn't is I look at the runtime and I can see the runtime playing on the player over here. And I know I'm looking at the back, being like, okay, we're getting close to the end. And you see the gun and you go, Oh no, if you don't know how it is. Like, no, don't let this happen. What the hell? They're such nice people. Yeah. Well, until I talk to you, I hate them. And so Sophie and and John are confronted by George in the kitchen. He doesn't have a reaction to them holding guns, pointing them at him, really, other than stop messing around. I'm going to call the police. Which John earlier cut the phone line, which made me think, is this a premeditated thing? But I think you're right. Once they're on that track and she's destroying things, the thought is, oh, I better cut the phone line. And it's John that does that, but it's actually Sophie that shoots first. And Shabral said, quote, the killer shoots first. Yeah. Can you explain what he meant by that?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:06

So Chabral clearly is like saying the audience can believe what they want, but what Shabral believes is that Sophie did kill her dad, but Sean didn't kill her daughter. And so the killer shoots first. So I I kind of like the openness of that. And I think that's that's kind of where he stands on the story.

Ron 1:01:23

And there's another part of me that wants to say this family is, I don't want to say clueless, but they hear a shot and the thought is, oh no, that's just Sean's car backfiring. They have no thought of potential, they they don't even have it in their mind that there could be potential danger, except for Catherine. But Catherine's response is to send a teenage boy and to see what's going on. Do you have any type of analysis of this family and how they're reacting to the noises and what Catherine does?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:49

I think it tracks for me. Think of, I don't know, just to bring it to today, think of the billionaires, people richer than we've ever seen before in the history of human civilization. These billionaires who truly think that they're completely invincible and they can do no wrong. And uh I think I I see a certain sense of invincibility to the families like we would never imagine that we were in any danger. Well, how could that possibly happen? So they're out of touchness with the class struggle, they're out of touchness with their own privilege or special status. That's kind of what occurred to me is that they weren't even like the class struggle is over. That kind of mindset.

Ron 1:02:26

I've seen a lot of violent scenes in movies. I don't know if I've ever seen something shot like this depicting violence in film quite like it. There, there's there's no slow motion, there's not a swelling score that builds to the violence. There's not really any hesitation. When Giles walks backwards back in, there's, I think, one line of dialogue, and then they shoot the son. And then right away they shoot Catherine and Melinda. There there's doesn't feel to be any catharsis in this. It doesn't feel like a release. What did you feel watching this ending for the first time where you see these four people shot and killed almost nonchalantly?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:05

Yeah. The the answer to this question kind of is tied up for me with all the Charlot films that I love and that I've re-watched. And I love something about his style that Bong Jun-ho points out in his little interview, which is I love how it's so dry and flat and very unsentimental and like unwilling to milk anything. I just re-watched Sunset Boulevard the other night, which I love. But boy, does Billy Wilder like to milk an image or a scene, milk the thing of Norma Desmond coming down the stairs and saying she's ready for her close-up. I mean, these are wonderful moments, but he he really like underlines and underscores and like hits it on the nose ten times. And Shabirl is just the opposite of that. He's he's completely flat and chilly almost. And so, in fact, Bong uh contrasts this, contrasts Shaburl to Scorsese. And he says Taxi Driver has a certain style for most of the film, but then at the end, when the violence happens, just like violence at the end of La Ceremonie, uh, you got that overhead shot and it's become almost operatic. The staging of that finale is so completely different stylistically from the rest of Taxi Driver. Scorsese intentionally pushing the film into like a higher operatic register. And Chabrol just will not do that. He he the same approach he brings to the to everyday domestic activities, that's the same approach he brings to the killing. And that feels so real to me. Um, it's just chilling. It's it's it's brilliant.

Ron 1:04:33

It is chilling because it's not what you're used to seeing. You're you're used to having these little hints that something terrible is coming, but all of a sudden, boom, it's done. And then you I I I had found myself thinking, Did I see what I just saw? Because you're not, it just happens so suddenly. Bang, bang, bang, bang. The family's gone. There's no confrontation. Sometimes you get a big speech explaining reasoning behind certain actions, but not here. The thing just happens. And it sounds like we're on the same page that I think that's the right choice. It seems on brand for Jabral and the story that he told that earned that type of ending.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:10

I also love the the last lines spoken in the film, and it's spoken twice. As soon as the killings are done, Sophie says ça va, and Jean says something like On a fait bien, which is in French that actually means we did well, but the subtitles translated slightly differently as well done. But it's not exactly well done. It's like we did a good job, you know, we did well. And the lines are repeated through the boom box over the credits at the at the end of the film, also. So it's a it's a really like flat kind of ending, those those words.

Ron 1:05:42

And John leaves and Sophie know they they have an understanding of I'm gonna clean up here.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:46

Yeah.

Ron 1:05:47

And when John leaves, she's killed almost immediately in a car accident caused by a priest who had previously fired her from a charity job. I I heard in the supplements when Chabral says when she when she passes the threshold. Of the gate. That's the another that's another boundary that that comes up of she's safe in there now from the outside world, but as soon as she crosses the boundary of the gate with her vehicle, she's no longer safe and she's killed immediately. And of all people, uh, the priest that fired her earlier from a volunteer job, which that's hard to get fired from a volunteer job.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:18

What do you make of the ending for Jean? The priest who kills her. It's a very ironic ending because in a way, Chabrol is also equating the priest with the bourgeois family. They're both like patriarchal structures. And he says something incredibly condescending when he fires them. He says something like, We're actually very tolerant here. But you know what? What can you expect from volunteers? That's what he tells them when he fires them. It's like you're not even good enough to be volunteers. So just this contemptuous, authoritarian, patronizing way in which he gives them that news aligns him for me with authority figures like the rich family. And so he's no different from them. And so the fact that he would kill her and then immediately be exonerated by the police because there's a line in there about, yeah, okay, it's not your fault. They immediately rule him out. And so that there's a little bit of critique there too. Of a critique meaning things aren't going to change. Critique of the fact that here's a person who died, Jean died, agreed that she killed a bunch of people, but but she dies, and nothing's gonna be done about her death. And her it was just a death that's the person who killed her has been immediately exonerated. Um but if they catch up with Sophie, she's not gonna be exonerated.

Ron 1:07:31

Yeah, she walks through, she walks free through the accident. The tape is playing, though. So it's not as though Jean can be implicated in this and be a solo actor in this, because unfortunately for Sophie, she's on the tape that the police find and are and are playing. So so where where does Sophie go from here? What do we think about Sophie's fate? Does she get caught? Does she disappear? I mean, she can't go very far if it requires any type of reading or writing. So I don't know if she's fooling someone to get another job. I don't know what Shabral wants us to think, and it doesn't seem like he cares that much. Exactly. From what I'm understanding, your teachings of of me this this morning or this afternoon is Shabral wants you to form your own opinions on what happens with Sophie next.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:12

Exactly. Your your own opinions and like write your own story about what's what the next chapter of her life will look like. We do have to remember that she's probably a resilient person. She's probably a person, I don't know, late 20s, early 30s, or mid-30s, not exactly sure what her age might be, but she's survived the slung. She's had employers in the past, and she's been able to get through. Maybe she can't keep an employer for that long, but if she's been able to do that before, she might be able to do it again. So that's that's all that's all you're kind of left with. But you're right, it's totally open.

Ron 1:08:44

What a film. I'm so happy that you suggested this because I might not have picked it up off the shelf. So we close every episode. The guest gets the chance to give their answer to why this film. So why La Ceremonie? Why does it deserve its place in the Criterion collection?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:58

Everyone probably has a different take on this, but uh it's clearly a film that is incredibly strong, has a lot of merits on multiple levels. I've had a soft spot in my heart for Chabrol because all the other new way filmmakers get so much more critical adoration and love than he does. Truffaut, Godard, Romer, Rivet, they're all more idolized than Chabrol. And they all make sort of art cinema. I mean, Chabrol also makes art cinema, but Chabrol really also makes genre cinema. And he's often complained about how he wished that the other French New Wave filmmakers seriously loved genre cinema and loved people and made films for the people, made popular cinema for the people. So this is part of me that really wants to give him love because I think he's an underappreciated New Wave filmmaker. The bigger reason is that I'm really interested in critical reception of films because I find that critics teach me about how to read films. And often when I watch a film and I have some thoughts and I go read a bunch of critics, when I Google up the film, I go to letterboxed, I have all sorts of new ideas that never occurred to me. And so the critical reception of this film is super interesting. In the 90s, when it came out, the kind of backdrop is that all through the 70s, Caille du Cinema, which is the journal that Chabrol wrote for, served on with his friends, Trofaux Godard, Shabrol, uh, Trofaux Godard Revette, etc., in the 70s, Caille du Cinema did not review a single film by Chabrol. They wrote him off as a hack. And his reputation was at an all-time low. But then when La Ceremonie came out, the reviews in Caille were rave reviews. The one of the critics even said, Is this the best French filmmaker working today? Another one said, Is this the best French post-war film? And a year or two later, they did a 100-page special dossier on Chabrol in Caille du cinema. So all of this was initiated by La Ceremony. And so I think it's a really special film that was recognized as being really special. And then it came to the US and critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum hailed it as a masterpiece of a film and wrote wonderful essays on it. So it has a strong reputation in America and England. And then on Letterboxd, it kind of acquired a new life of critics and xenophiles who embraced it as like an interesting film that was a queer film, you know, be gay do crime film. And so it's had all of these critical lives that have discovered more and more about this film, that have kind of unlocked more and more about this film. And so I think it's an incredibly rich film if we look at it through the lens of all the critics who have written about it and what they've said about it. And I would say that all of that together, if we take all of that as evidence of how good a film is, I think this film is wonderful and deserves to be in the Criterion collection.

Ron 1:11:51

A very rich film and an incredibly rich conversation. Thank you again to Gira Shambu for taking the time to speak with me about La Ceremonie. If you'd like to support the show for as little as $3 a month, you can do so by selecting the support the show link in the episode description. You can follow the podcast on Instagram for updates and subscribe on YouTube for full video versions of almost all episodes. Links are also in the description below. Next time I'll be joined by Carlos Aguilar to discuss Jonathan Glazer's Earth. Thanks again for listening. Please be sure to follow, share, and keep an eye out for the next episode.