La cérémonie (1995)

Reasons for calling a film "weird" may be of several kinds. Some films do their very utmost to appear smart & weird. Others are weird in spite of their fairly straightforward agendas (well - watch Point break....). It's hard to say whether Chabrol's La cérémonie fits any of these categories. On the surface, this a film that doesn't take radical measures with film conventions. We have a fairly uncomplicated story: a girl acquires a position as a maid in a rich family's household. We find out she is illiterate. She does everything to hide it. The girl, Sophie, becomes friends with a woman who works at the post office. Her relations to the family she works for becomes more and more strained.

But afterwards, thinking about the film, it's really hard to come to grips with what the film was about. And it's even harder to say anything about in what spirit the story was told; was it a comedy, tragedy, social critique? And even though the details of the story seemed quite easy to grasp, it is hard to tell why a certain scene is important for the overall story. What is the significance in the film of Sophie's illiteracy? Why do they show the daughter fixing a car when nothing in particular seems to have been revealed in that skill of hers? Or, more to the point, the film seems to lack an "overall story". This is where I am starting to think that the film is less the result of a careless script than it is a conscious play with expectations. In a conventional film, we expect scenes to provide us with certain pieces of information and/or emotions and/or twists that result in character development. La cérémonie takes liberties with all this. Nothing seems to make sense even though, on the surface, there is no real mystery either.  In each scene, in some sense, we seem to "know" what is going on; the patriarch has a fit of anger; Jeanne talks about her son; Sophie watches bad game shows on TV. And, for Christ's sake - the film is based on a Ruth Rendell novel! How hard can it be? And on a primary level, it is not even the ending, the acts of sudden and shocking violence, that makes me say that La cérémonie fucks with my sense of sense. Because haven't we seen that kind of violence a thousand times before? What is so troubling to me is not the inexplicable acts of violence, but the schizoid approach of the film.

There are too many anti-climaxes, overstatements, (intentionally?) mannered acting and eerie blind alleys for this to be interpreted as a clumsy attempt at thriller-comedy. When looked at in this way, the film actually gets kind of interesting. But isn't that quite strange: the film is so pointless that I start thinking that there must be a point on some other level?  - This, again, is related to the many ways in which a film might be said to be pointless. I am not perplexed by a Jackie Chan film being, in some people's eyes, pointless. The strange thing is that La cérémonie in quite brutal ways cuts short the viewer's quest for meaning. And that was, to me, both disturbing and interesting.