Two of the finest—and strangest—French actresses of our time play a pair of menial workers in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie, based on Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgement in Stone. As the rapport builds between Isabelle Huppert's volatile postal clerk and Sandrine Bonnaire's tight-lipped maid, Huppert confesses: "I'd really like to be an actress, wouldn't you?" With just about any American or British star, the line would seem bathetic or incredible. But these two astonishing actresses so completely shrug off their glamour—though not their luminous, compulsive watchability—that it rings true. They are humble people dreaming of histrionics. Like everything in Chabrol's perfectly poised film, the line hints at hidden depths while staying rooted in the everyday.

    Such as, for instance, the first scene of the film, played out in the bleached white light of a winter's morning in Saint Malo, northern France, in which Mme Lelièvre (Jacqueline Bisset), the elegant wife of a wealthy businessman, picks up Sophie (Bonnaire) from the station, and interviews her in a local restaurant about the job of looking after her house. The meeting is curt and joyless—as fraught as the strings resounding on the soundtrack. Sophie gets the job and makes a satisfactory, self-effacing start. If she is diffident, even defensive, it may be only that she is desperate for her employers not to know that she is illiterate. Or, then again, there may be a darker secret—one that bonds her with Huppert.

    Huppert is already known to the family Bonnaire works for—and hated and distrusted by them. But Bonnaire forms an outlaw friendship with her. They collect discarded clothes for the local church, though even their charity hints at something sinister, disturbed. These weird soul sisters are linked by an odd closure of character; the world proceeds unnoticed by their tight, focused minds. They are not unhappy, just detached.

    Isabelle Huppert, last Saturday night, won the French César award for best actress. Fine though Huppert is, it should have gone to Bonnaire (also nominated). It is her pale, tense presence that carries the film, whose first section Huppert doesn't appear in. "I would have noticed if she were hideous," Bisset tells her family when she first employs Bonnaire. And it is true there is nothing outwardly alarming about Bonnaire: just a hint of pique in her quietness, maybe, a flutter of neurosis in her efficiency. Her short, trim figure and her trousers make her seem girlish. The only real worry is in the flustered way she clears a tray of glasses, betraying more madness than method.

    Huppert's clerk is a much more obviously troubling character: sullen, abusive, atrabilious. Both Bonnaire and Huppert have always had a coldness in their acting, equally well suited to playing the transcendent and the transgressive. Here their peculiar brands of off-centre beauty—Bonnaire all gaunt intensity; Huppert wispy distraction—meet and meld. In one of the most memorable scenes, they watch television, arms around each other's shoulders, joined into one brooding beast.

    Some may view the movie as an attack on the bourgeoisie, as represented by the family Bonnaire works for. But Chabrol, though he has described the film as the "last Marxist movie," retains some balance. True, the Lelièvres are rich and live in luxury. At the climax, the family watch Don Giovanni on television, wearing evening dress. However, even here, it is hard to gauge from their high-flown dialogue ("It's very homogenous: nobody stands out," Mme L says of the performance), whether we are supposed to see them as pretentious or cultured. Certainly, they are considerate employers, even if Jacqueline Bisset's superb mistress of the house is too chic-ly busy to notice much that goes on around her. If the movie has a message, it's that the fault lies not in masters or serfs, but in the society that fosters such divisions. The rich's succour only exacerbates the wounds of the poor. Then again, you may think the movie illustrates the problem of getting good staff these days.

    For Chabrol, this is a return to the form of his heyday, of films such as Le Boucher (1970). His imagery is subtly unsettling, as when he shoots Bonnaire getting out of a car from around the other side of it. As so often in his work, the feel is Hitchcockian. There is an indefinable but distinct sense of foreboding, and one unbearable suspense sequence. But there is not so much sadism as with Hitch. Chabrol withdraws the knife rather than turning it, allowing us to stop screaming and start thinking. It is probably best that you know as little about the plot as possible. But one word of advice: stay for the credits—this is a movie that stores surprises to the end.