A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL May 10, 1997 I've seen two films and a play this week--a social satire, a serious musical, and a thriller (Citizen Ruth, Carousel, and La Ceremonie)-- all of which focus in one way or another on issues of class and the differences between the way the world looks to people securely in the middle class and to those on the economic and social margins of society. I'm sorry I couldn't review "Citizen Ruth" last week because it is a film Women's Show listeners should know about and see, but it is no longer showing in our area so I'll just tell you to watch for it on video, and I'll move on to this week's offering at the Tampa Theater, "La Ceremonie." This is French filmmaker Claude Chabrol in a macabre mood, making a film based on one of Ruth Rendell's mystery novels. It's a dark and compelling story of two working class women in their 30s, both of whom have things in their past that eat quietly away at them, though there's little on the surface that calls attention to their troubled inner lives. But when they meet and, over time, become friends and gradually share with one another their innermost secrets, their mutual influences on one another are such that their smoldering resentments burst out into violent deeds with a vengeance. I suppose this, like so many recent films, counts as a "comeuppance film." But here the vengeance wreaked is against those perceived as class rather than gender oppressors, though, of course, the afflictions of these women at the bottom of the economic heap are gender specific, those of a daughter forced to care for her sick and demanding father and of a single mother working two jobs to support her daughter. But we don't know these things about Sophie and Jeanne at the beginning of the film. Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is a very reserved and serious-seeming young woman who takes a job as cook and housekeeper with a well-to-do family in a remote area of France. The Lelievre family consists of Catherine and George (Jacqueline Bisset and Jean Pierre Cassel) and their two late teen children Melinda and Gilles. The family is self absorbed but seemingly harmonious enough; they are patronizing about Sophie but not portrayed in any way as monsters or villains. Melinda is the social conscience of the family and constantly throws it up to them when they treat Sophie in demeaning or thoughtless ways, but, on the whole, they think of themselves as good people treating their help kindly. Nothing seems out of the ordinary here. Except.... Except for the skillful ways Chabrol has of creating a sense of ominousness over the whole business. He's so good at the little tiny thing that gives you this feeling of uneasiness (even when you can see what he's doing and how). A good example is the scene where Catherine goes to meet Sophie's train on her first day of work. There is nothing at all in the images on the screen of a woman waiting for a train and the train coming slowly into the station and people getting off that should be scary; but the musical score tells you something's amiss. Needless to say Sophie does not get off the train. But the camera finds her in a long shot, standing on the next track silently watching Catherine watch for her, and a little tiny ominous chill runs down your spine. Great suspense building! Later it seems we've found the clue to Sophie's oddness. It's something that she herself would never on pain of death reveal to anyone, so Chabrol has an interesting task in figuring out how to convey this information to the audience and he succeeds brilliantly, though the audience has a little work to do to figure it out. But, as we learn after Sophie becomes acquainted with the preternaturally pert postal clerk, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), there's more to Sophie's story than what we have discerned so far. And more to Jeanne's too. Something else that clues us in to what makes these women tick is the scene in which they each tell what they know about the other (which I won't reveal, so I won't spoil the plot for you). It's their reaction to these revelations-- so matter of fact and even joyous--that intensifies the sense that these are very strange women, indeed. The shared knowledge makes them partners, somehow, though not lovers in a physical sense. In fact, Jeanne's ability to leap up and cheerfully head off to do good works after the revelations have mov ed them to embrace and kiss one another while lying on her bed then becomes yet another in the growing list of strange reactions these women evince. This film has variously been compared with "Thelma and Louise" and a Hitchcock film. I don't buy the first comparison because these women never, even for a moment, transcend their oppressive situations; their crimes are not, except in their own minds, a just payback for offenses committed against them. But it does rival the best of Hitchcock as a psychological thriller, especially the moment of supreme irony at the end. This is a real treasure of its genre, beautifully constructed and superbly acted, and I recommend it highly. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1997. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.