The wealthy Catherine invites Sophie at a diner and hires her as her maid at her secluded mansion. Sophie moves in to the mansion, consisting out of Catherine, her husband Georges, and their two teenage kids, Melinda and Gilles. Sophie is illiterate and hides this in all ways possible: when asked by Georges why she doesn't have a driver's license, she claims that she needs glasses, but when he drops her off at an ophthalmologist, Sophie simply doesn't go there and buys some fake glasses. Since she cannot read the list of groceries, she asks a post office worker, Jeanne, to order the food for her. It turns out Sophie was implicated when a house burned down and killed her father, but acquitted. Jeanne was also acquitted of the murder of her 4-year old handicapped child. When Melinda finds out Sophia cannot read, Sophie tries to blackmail her by threatening to reveal Melinda is pregnant. Upon finding that out, Georges fires Sophie. Jeanne and Sophie enter the mansion, take two guns and shoot the entire family. Later, Jeanne dies in a car crash because she drove at night without lights on.
As much as "La Ceremonie" is an excellent film, so much it is difficult to pinpoint exactly why. The story about a maid in a growing friction with a family for which she works for in a mansion is nothing new, the style and dialogue is also conventional, and yet, there is something fascinating and slowly absorbing about how all of this unfolds until the shocking ending. So many scenes sound ordinary on paper, but Claude Chabrol, the "French Hitchcock", somehow manages to make them appear intriguing, even though the viewers do not know what kind of a story they are watching until the finale. Chabrol uses crime elements to enhance the drama and use them to give a psychological analysis of the society. The stand-out performance is the extraordinary Isabelle Huppert, the actress who never gave a weak performance, and who plays Jeanne, the quirky-weird post office clerk who becomes Sophie's friend. Huppert gives little funny gestures, touches and bits that bring this character to life and ignite either a chuckle or amazement.
In one scene, Jeanne knocks on the window of the mansion, Sophie opens it and says: "Wait, I'll open the door", but Jeanne just brushes it off: "Ah, don't bother", as she makes a huge step to cross inside the mansion through the window. While waiting on the phone in her post office job, Jeanne takes the bubble gum from her mouth and sticks it under the desk. After introducing themselves as church volunteers who collect donated clothes for the poor, Jeanne and Sophie enter a house, an old lady gives them a bundle of old clothes, but Jeanne just sits on the ground and picks one robe after another, and jokingly throws it behind her back, again and again, claiming it is all no good. The finale gives the movie a new dimension, already hinted at in the chilling, disturbing scene of Jeanne telling about her "accidental" murder of her child while driving the car. Roger Ebert included "La Ceremonie" in his list of Great Movies, and even gave a great analysis that says it all: "La Ceremonie," he has said, is a Marxist film about class struggle, but perhaps it is more of a Freudian film, about the scarcely repressed sexuality of Jeanne and Sophie, and the ways it is expressed against a family that represents for both of them a hated authority." Indeed, these two seem to be stuck in an existence where nothing works, and thus rebel out of contempt against a family whose life is somehow settled and ideal.
Grade:+++
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