LA CÉRÉMONIE Movie Review

A Judgment in Stone

Isabelle Huppert took home France's highest film honor, the César, for her performance as a deranged post office worker (another American trait the French have picked up?) who befriends a shy, illiterate, live-in housekeeper (Sandrine Bonnaire, who shared the Venice Festival's Best Actress Prize with Huppert) in Claude Chabrol's tense, satisfying, darkly funny thriller about class, sex, and rage. The pair team up to chip away at the smug and hypocritical bourgeois family Bonnaire works for, played with creepy efficiency by Jacqueline Bisset and Jean-Pierre Cassel as the couple, Valentin Merlet as the young son, and Virginie Ledoyen (A Single Girl) as the exquisite, harmlessly vacuous, 19-year-old daughter. It doesn't take long to see where the picture's going, but that doesn't keep it from being deliciously voyeuristic, nasty fun. The violence in La Cérémonie isn't overly graphic, but middle-class audiences get so spooked imagining themselves as the decadent, class-proud homeowners that when the moment of reckoning arrives, they tend to take it personally—and jump out of their seats. The film won the National Society of Film Critics and Los Angeles Film Critics Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

NEXT STOP … Repulsion, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Badlands

1995 111m/C FR Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Virginie Ledoyen; D: Claude Chabrol; W: Claude Chabrol, Caroline Eliacheff; C: Bernard Zitzermann; M: Matthieu Chabrol. Cesar Awards '96: Best Actress (Huppert); Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards '96: Best Foreign Film; National Society of Film Critics Awards '96: Best Foreign Film; Nominations: Cesar Awards '96: Best Actress (Bonnaire), Best Director (Chabrol), Best Film, Best Supporting Actor (Cassel), Best Supporting Actress (Bisset), Best Writing. VHS NYF