La Cérémonie

La Cérémonie (1995) may be the finest film of Claude Chabrol's late career. It won its two leads a shared Best Actress award at Venice and reaffirmed the New Wave veteran as the great French chronicler of class and of the murderous currents that run under bourgeois life. He adapted it from a Ruth Rendell novel, and it is a study in social dread.

Sandrine Bonnaire plays the impassive, illiterate maid and Isabelle Huppert the malicious postmistress whose friendship emboldens them both, set against the comfortable, oblivious family that employs the maid. Chabrol directs with cool precision, watching the small humiliations and condescensions of class with a clinical eye while a sense of impending violence gathers under the placid surface. He named class resentment itself as the film's true subject, and called it the last Marxist film.

Critics placed it among the finest suspense films of its decade and among its sharpest pieces of social observation. Chilly, controlled and terrifying, La Cérémonie turns a domestic arrangement into a powder keg and lays open the violence latent in inequality. This is essential Chabrol: Hitchcockian craft married to a distinctly French fascination with the cruelties of the well-bred. Huppert and Bonnaire make one of the great screen duos of the decade, and the film's clinical dissection of class resentment confirmed Chabrol, late in his career, as French cinema's foremost anatomist of bourgeois cruelty.