La Cérémonie

Director: Claude Chabrol

1995 / 111min / DCP

Coyly referred to by its director as “the last Marxist film,” Chabrol��s mid-career tour-de-force is a work of gelid precision and slow, suffocating rage, its action set in motion when bourgeois homemaker Jacqueline Bisset brings home a new maid, Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire), who then starts exhibiting unusual behavior—this around the time that she strikes up a close friendship with the eccentric and embittered local postmistress (Isabelle Huppert), who wastes no opportunity to rail against Sophie’s employers. Riveting in its total immersion in the logic of class resentment, and shocking in its depiction of the consequences of that resentment.