This above shot of the title here shows Léo Ferré's L'Île du Guesclin in the background: most of the film is set in this area of Brittany, with Saint-Coulomb as the village featuring in it. The film is adapted from Ruth Rendall's The Judgment in Stone (1977), itself inspired (as was Jean Genet's play Les Bonnes (1947)) by the true story of the Papin sisters, who murdered their employees in 1933.
Chabrol said that he wasn't a Marxist, although he added that he had made a Marxist film. The two principal characters who quickly become friends are Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a servant in the Lelièvre household, and Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a postal clerk in the village. Both young women have troubled pasts, Jeanne has a strong hatred for the bourgeoisie, and the timid Sophie hides a the fact that she is ashamed of being unable to read.
Taking many lessons from Hitchcock's films, this movie is shot through with suspense, and both the music and the long shots dwelling on the wealth and culture displayed in the house prepare the viewer for the unknown but obviously sinister events to come.
On seeing the Lelièvre family's library, Jeanne fishes out Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit, asks Sophie if she's read it, and decides to 'borrow' it herself. There is perhaps a double irony here: Jeanne doesn't seem like the kind of person who would enjoy Céline or even understand the book, although at the same time one wonders if Georges Lelièvre (Jean-Pierre Cassel) or his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) would appreciate this anti-capitalist book.
Georges seems particularly proud of his cultural knowledge, and swiftly recognises a quotation one his dinner guests mentions as being from Nietzsche. Towards the end, the family (Georges, Catherine, daughter Melinda and son Gilles) all sit on the sofa to watch Mozart's opera Don Giovanni: an activity which strongly contrasts with Sophie and Jeanne's liking for low-brow television programmes. Jeanne hates the family because they are rich, showing that the class war still exists. Melinda's remark (made twice) about 'people like you' (i.e. illiterate) and George's apparently great surprise that illiterate people exist in France towards the end of the millennium clearly show that class divisions and class ignorance are still prominent: there's no political correctness here. Inevitably it all ends in a bloodbath, with Sophie following it up by symbolically shooting at the bookcase. A powerful film.
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