Director: Claude Chabrol
La Cérémonie is a remarkably tense thriller, its class tensions mirrored with unexpressed eroticism that eventually finds a lethal outlet. While director Claude Chabrol’s narrative approach to murder is often linked to Hitchcock, Jonathan Rosenbaum has rightly claimed that Fritz Lang’s sense of abstract objectivity is undoubtedly a huge influence on his films. In La Cérémonie, the camera’s relationship to the characters is ever-shifting. When Catherine Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) arrives at a train station to greet Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), she fails to see her on the other side of the tracks. Chabrol shoots the sequence from Catherine’s point-of-view–that is, the audience is allied with what Catherine sees, or in this case fails to see. However, much of the film plays in longer takes, shooting characters from a comfortable distance. Sophie’s interactions with Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert) are often viewed in prolonged medium or long shots, so much so that the psychology of the characters and their rapidly growing friendship is alienating. Had Chabrol relied on frequent shot-counter-shots that showed Sophie’s reactions to specific encounters with Julie, for example, the eventual flourishing of her adolescent side might have been more conceivable for the audience. As it is, the film is disorienting and mysterious, concluding with a final act that is at once improbable and inevitable.
Director: Claude Chabrol
The title of Claude Chabrol’s 1988 abortion drama Story of Women makes it clear that it is intended to dramatize an individual’s journey as a reflected criticism of society at large. Set in Vichy France, Isabelle Huppert plays a woman loosely based on Marie-Louie Giraud, an abortionist and brothel keeper famed as being the last woman guillotined in France. Neither Chabrol nor Huppert are particularly interested in moralizing–despite the complexity of the material, notice how Huppert shows a businesslike indifference to her trade. The ethics of abortion rarely come into question, rather it serves as an avenue for one woman to make ends meet. Similarly, Huppert’s character entirely neglects traditional roles of womanhood, outsourcing her chores to a maid and even hiring a woman to sleep with her husband (Francois Cluzet). And yet, despite these conventional immoralities, the film is more concerned with the irony of a society that sentences a woman to death due to her participation in terminated pregnancies, and yet leaves her children without a mother. Her fate suggests the violent impossibility of escaping the throes of repression–taking initiative in her life is ultimately what spells her downfall.
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