Claude Chabrol has spent much of his nearly forty-year career as a filmmaker examining the upper strata of the French bourgeoisie, with all of its attendant trappings: splendid, often isolated houses with impeccable furnishings; landscaping just this side of Versailles; clothing and grooming that make the women look like models and the men like the high-level execs that they are; and, of course, the little disruptions—a mother fixation (À double tour, Ophelia), an extramarital affair (La Femme infidèle, Juste avant la nuit, Les Noces rouges), incessant bickering (Chabrol's vicious episode in Paris vu par...)—that end up destroying, often violently, small pieces of the leisure class's infrastructure from within.

    On very rare occasions, however, the attack comes from without in the form of a kind of unorganized class warfare. In the 1970 La Rupture (The Breakup), a former topless dancer wins a struggle against her extremely wealthy in-laws for custody of her child, who has been seriously injured by his drug-crazed father. But it is in La Cérémonie, released in France in 1995 and premiered in the United States this past December, that the director has made what seems to be his most conscious statement on the subject. "You can't draw the conclusion," Chabrol has noted in a recent interview, "that the fall of Communism put an end to what Marx called the class struggle. I think what I want to say in this film is 'Be careful, it's not over.'"

    Indeed, those who have been drawn to La Cérémonie because of its billing as a "thriller" from a director dubbed as the "French Hitchcock," an appellation Chabrol has never worn very comfortably, have no doubt found themselves sorely disappointed. In the sober and somber La Cérémonie, unlike the flamboyant La Rupture, almost nothing that could be designated as thriller-type action takes place until the film's violent conclusion, at which point one suddenly realizes that Chabrol has set up everything with the precision and irony of a Greek tragedian. Based, like many of Chabrol's films, on an English-language novel (Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone), La Cérémonie deals with the arrival of a new maid, Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire), at the splendid country house of an extremely rich family with a classically bourgeois name, Lelièvre (literally "the hare").

    As the action progresses, Sophie turns out to be the perfect maid. She is a great cook, and she keeps the small chateau inhabited by the Lelièvres spotless. But she totally refuses to warm up to any of the family members. When she reveals that she doesn't know how to drive, they offer to give her driving lessons. When she then uses the excuse that she needs new glasses, they take her into town to get new glasses (she uses the occasion to buy a chocolate bar and a pair of lightly tinted sunglasses). To much of what is said to her, she simply answers, expressionless, "J'ai compris" (I understood).

    As we soon discover, Sophie is illiterate, and she goes to great lengths to hide her handicap from everybody. It begins to seem that La Cérémonie's principal drama will revolve around when and how Sophie's secret will be discovered. The plot takes a turn to the left when Sophie finally lets herself relax into a friendship with a postal employee named Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert, in her fourth Chabrol film) who, like Sophie, has been exonerated for a death that may or may not have been accidental (a potential infanticide for Jeanne, a possible patricide for Sophie—speaking of Greek tragedy...). Their combined energy turns into what Chabrol has called a folie à deux (madness for two), which ultimately gathers the kind of force that can only resolve itself in the violence of the film's finale, in which Jeanne and Sophie blow away the entire Lelièvre family with shotguns portentously introduced into the filmic narrative around its midpoint (in this sense, La Cérémonie has echoes of Jean Genet's play The Maids, and of a little known gem of French cinema, Nico Papatakis's 1963 Les Abysses).

    And that's it. La Cérémonie has no obvious good guys, no obvious bad guys, and Chabrol takes only mild potshots at targets probably more obvious in France than elsewhere. The father (Jean-Pierre Cassel, who plays a particularly disagreeable character in La Rupture), loves classical music, to the point that he even dons evening wear to sit and watch, with his family, a televised Don Giovanni. At one moment the mother, Catherine, played by none other than Jacqueline Bisset (whose slightly less than perfectly accented French is never explained away), forbids her barely adolescent son (Valentin Merlet) to smoke, while the next moment she shares a cigarette with him as the two watch a "good movie" on television (Chabrol's own Les Noces rouges from 1972). Further, Catherine's fatal terror of finding herself without domestic help becomes one of the film's ironic focal points, since it keeps her husband from firing Sophie while there is still time. Sophie is guilty of little more than being relentlessly sullen, while Jeanne's worst flaws are a slight craziness from time to time, and a disturbing habit of opening Monsieur Lelièvre's mail.

    Thus does Chabrol draw a battleground that seems fairly ambiguous, at least by Hollywood standards. None of the characters, with one exception, is particularly likable. And the two characters whose enmity leads to the final tragedy are the least sympathetic of all. On the right there is Monsieur Lelièvre, with his little bursts of righteous indignation. On the left, there is Jeanne, whose matter-of-fact hostility turns her character towards the repellent. But Chabrol is no Costa-Gavras, setting up characters on the right whose obnoxiousness leads us to cheer on sympathetic characters from the left. The sides in La Cérémonie are created by the class situation itself, not by the melodramatic establishing of good versus evil. And if we tend to root a bit more, in La Cérémonie, for the Lelièvre family, it is because theirs is the lifestyle that the class society in which we have grown up has taught us to strive for (although I might draw the line at watching televised Mozart in a tux).

    Chabrol even sets up his viewers with one character who seems to rise above the various annoying habits of class, and that is Catherine's stepdaughter, Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen). It is Melinda who accuses her parents of deliberately numbing out the new maid with the television set in her room. It is Melinda who knows how to fix Jeanne's broken-down car (and who then wipes her dirty hands on a handkerchief borrowed from Jeanne). It is Melinda who has the almost impossibly sweet, gentle, and cooperative boyfriend. And it is Melinda who discovers Sophie's illiteracy and offers to teach her to read. But it is that apparently innocent gesture of upper-class liberalism that sets the final wheels of the tragedy in motion.

    One shudders to imagine what Hollywood would do with these two characters: Melinda would ultimately conquer Sophie's inhibitions, leading to a scene, backed by impossibly slurpy music, where Sophie, with tears streaming down her face, would pronounce her first words while reading a book. But Chabrol will have none of that. In La Cérémonie, Sophie brutally repulses Melinda's offer and threatens to tell her father Melinda is pregnant if the secret of her analphabetism is revealed. This is one of the cinema's great reality checks. Throughout, La Cérémonie has suckered us, with its almost plodding unfurling of everyday events, into a kind of feel-good attitude towards the Lelièvre family, and our main concerns have to do with why Sophie remains cold to their kindness, and why she has to pal around with the annoying Jeanne. It is only in retrospect that we realize that the Lelièvres are only slightly more enlightened than the American southerners who used to tell us that they were "good to their niggers."

    Chabrol's film allows for almost no catharsis, instead imposing a kind of Brechtian esthetics that force us to reflect on what we have just seen and, ultimately, to see upper-class liberalism as a form of fascism that helps maintain the class system by keeping its slaves happy...but disposable. Melinda, when asked by her father whether she finds the idea of giving Sophie driving lessons too paternalistic, answers, "Paternalistic, no. Demagogic, yes." But Melinda remains blind to her own demagoguery when, while letting Sophie serve tea and get the sugar, she proposes to help her learn to read. In La Cérémonie, Sophie's illiteracy becomes not something that can be fixed from country estates by the bleeding hearts of bourgeois aristocrats, if you'll pardon the oxymoron, but rather the emblem of a situation that only the elimination of class structure can resolve.

    For the role of Sophie, Sandrine Bonnaire creates a character who, appropriately, remains difficult to read. Her sullenness may hide still waters running deeply, or it may be the mask worn by an entire political philosophy. Or both. Such is the result of the interactions between a great actress and a gifted director working with a probing screenplay. Isabelle Huppert fits perfectly into the manic and flighty self-righteousness called for by the role of Jeanne, while, in the role of Catherine, Jacqueline Bisset becomes the most elegant of Chabrol's bourgeois-aristocratic women since Stéphane Audran, the director's second wife, who frequently appeared in his films through the early Seventies and who recently resurfaced in the 1992 Betty. As Georges Lelièvre, Jean-Pierre Cassel becomes the very embodiment of the way Chabrol envisages the entire family. And, as subtly portrayed by Virginie Ledoyen, the character of Melinda wears a sweet face and a pleasant manner over a basic emptiness.

    Chabrol's son, Matthieu, provided the music for La Cérémonie. Scored for string quartet and piano and featuring mildly unsettling dissonances, it is the kind of music that Monsieur Lelièvre might listen to in an adventurous moment. And, somewhat in the manner of the brilliant scores provided by Pierre Jansen, who once formed with Chabrol one of the most significant composer/director teams in film history, Matthieu Chabrol's lugubrious score also appears just often enough, usually during transitions, to keep the viewer's nerves on edge.

    But the real hero here is director/cowriter Chabrol. Without using the jump cuts, the insert shots, the fractured narratives, and the numerous other distancing devices of his New Wave colleague Jean-Luc Godard, Chabrol has nonetheless managed to make not a political film but rather to make a film politically. That he has somehow slipped La Cérémonie into the United States and elsewhere as a thriller may be his biggest accomplishment of all.