The Ceremony
With Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Virginie Ledoyen, and Valentin Merlet.
The plot of The Ceremony is fairly simple, but it’s also full of ambiguity–something that corresponds at times to the elegant mise en scene. The very first shot, for example, follows Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire) as she crosses the street toward the camera, turns to the left, enters a cafe, and is greeted by Catherine Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset), who calls her over. It’s a shot lasting over half a minute, and something of a tour de force, because it involves several camera movements and a continuity between exterior and interior lighting. What makes it ambiguous is that it seems like an objective shot filmed from the approximate vantage point of Catherine, who’s sitting inside the cafe watching Sophie approach through the plate-glass window. It isn’t until the shot is more than half over that we glimpse Catherine in the foreground and realize that what we’re seeing is subjective.
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The Ceremony marks an important shift in Chabrol’s view of the bourgeoisie; for the first time he seems to like his bourgeois characters without irony or sarcasm: they’re a sweet bunch of people. Yet most of The Ceremony is seen from the vantage point of Sophie and her best friend, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a postal worker whose hatred for the Lelievre family grows to such unreasonable proportions that anything becomes possible. The brilliance of Chabrol’s movie rests precisely in this dialectical ambivalence: one feels throughout that he has nothing but affection for the Lelievres, yet he also understands deeply the murderous class hatred of Sophie and Jeanne and precisely how it develops. Like the ambiguous shifts between a Hitchcockian and a Langian approach, this ambivalence gives Chabrol’s thriller most of its tension and edge. Significantly, his cowriter–Caroline Eliacheff, the wife of Marin Karmitz, the producer–is a psychoanalyst, and in interviews Chabrol credits her for developing the psychology and psychopathology of both these women beyond the elements found in the novel. (Readers who don’t want more of the plot revealed should check out here.)
