Cole Smithey - Capsules: Suspense

92 posts categorized "Suspense"

October 22, 2023

LA CEREMONIE — SHOCKTOBER!

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The revolution comes from the inside in Claude Chabrol’s exquisite adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s 1977 leftist novel “A Judgement In Stone.”

Not since Luis Bunuel has any filmmaker come so daringly close to enunciating the ideological, ethical, and soulful rift between the bourgeoisie and the rest of us as Chabrol does in this fascinating, if darkly sensuous, picture. Lesbian fires ignite between two would-be murderess[s].

Rituals such as family dinners or private parties allow for characters to interact, impregnate, and divide. As with Bunuel’s films, food plays a significant part in these daily rites.

The story unfolds in the northwest coast of France where art gallery director Catherine Lelievres (Jacqueline Bisset) lives in French countryside splendor with her recent (opera-obsessed) husband Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and his two teenage children (Melinda and Gilles) from a previous marriage.

Catherine hires Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) as her latest live-in maid to keep her lavish home tidy and cook the family meals.

Sophie keeps secrets close to her chest. Her illiteracy means that she can't order the weekly groceries because she can't read the list. Help arrives in the magnetic tomboy form of Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a local postal clerk with a murderous past. Jeanne knows that Sophie was accused of murdering her handicapped dad but was let go due to a lack of proof. Threat of prison is a mutual experience since Jeanne was accused of killing her four-year-old daughter, but was found innocent.

21^st century audiences may be surprised to learn that there was such a thing as a “boy-bun” long before there was a “man-bun” as evidenced by Catherine’s adopted son Gilles (Valentin Merlet).

Addressing Gilles's freshly budding smoking habit, Catherine tells her adopted son, “It’s easier not to start than it is to quit.” Naturally, she offers him a cigarette later on when it suits her. She decrees that Gilles can only smoke in her presence. Careful social coding comes through in every sequence involving the family. Their limited (stereotype) attitudes clash against the intimate (female outlaw) romantic reality that Bonnaire and Huppert share. Their mutual attraction is real.

Claude Chabrol deftly uses television as an implement of reality displacement that Sophie learns to use to deny demands that are placed on her, such as when Georges calls requesting that she retrieve a file from his desk. She becomes a robot to the TV in same way that audiences all over the world are.

“La Ceremonie” is a film that is ahead of its time, just as much as it is of its time. Isabelle Huppert’s determined (read lesbian leftist activist) character speaks the film’s theme lines with sinewy authority.

Regarding Sophie’s discovery of Melinda’s (Virginie Ledoyen) pregnancy, Jeanne says, “It’s no problem for them [the Lelievres), anyway. Keep it or get rid of it, no problem.”

Indeed, Jeanne’s brief summation of Melinda’s dilemma coincides with the teenaged girl's blasé attitude in the face of her next day's scheduled abortion. Charming Melinda sits happily on the sofa with her snobby family watching a VHS-recorded opera. Virginie Ledoyen is the embodiment of privileged nubility. Incredible, and contemptible.

Regardless of how much elites (in any country) attempt to buffer themselves from the lower classes, they must always remain at the workers' mercy in the form of service industry jobs. Poison comes in many forms.

Chabrol’s dream-team cast comes together in a once-in-a-lifetime event. I could wax poetic about Jean-Pierre Cassel, who delivers such a wonderfully bland rendition of veiled white supremacist viewpoints that you could blink and miss it. Jacqueline Bisset reaches microcosmic degrees of restrained emotion like you can’t believe.

Don’t get me started on cinematographer Bernard Zitzermann’s dynamic formalism that works like guitar in a jazz trio, playing against Monique Fardoulis’s snappy editing. This film is a flawless example of French Cinema. Look. There it is.

Not Rated. 112 mins.

Posted by Cole Smithey at 4:33 PM in Cult Film, FIVE STARS, French Cinema, LGBTQ, Political Satire, SHOCKTOBER!, Social Satire, Suspense, Transgressive Cinema, Video Essay, Women's Cinema | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 10, 2023

DIABOLIQUE — SHOCKTOBER!

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Henri-Georges Clouzot was termed “the French Hitchcock” for good reason.

After the enormous success of “The Wages of Fear” (1953) a year earlier, Clouzot made a suspense-thriller that changed the game for what audiences could expect from the genre. “Diabolique” introduced the “twist ending,” and with it ushered in a new era in cinema that continues to this day.

Clouzot narrowly beat Alfred Hitchcock to the punch of purchasing the screenplay rights to the novel (“The Woman Who Was No More”) upon which the film is based.

Not only would Hitchcock echo “Diabolique” less than 10 years later with a bathroom-set murder in “Psycho,” but Clouzot’s groundbreaking thriller would also instruct generations of filmmakers in the nuances of horror and suspense.

For “Psycho,” Hitchcock not only extrapolated on the significance of the human eyeball as an object of death, but he also borrowed from Clouzot’s publicity campaign that implored “Diabolique’s” audience not to share the secret of its shocking plot twist. Even Peter Falk’s bumbling television detective Colombo was lifted from Charles Vanel’s inquisitive private detective character Alfred Fichet, who comes along to solve “Diabolique’s” apparent “murder.”

Employing a perverse noir image system of complicated shadows, distorting windows, tilted mirrors, confined spaces — such as two prominently featured bathrooms — and a murky swimming pool filled with opaque water, Clouzot tells the story of two women’s plan to kill the man who abuses them both. That one of the women is the man’s wife and the other his mistress adds to the film’s perpetual state of escalating anxiety. It’s notable that Clouzot and his co-writer Jérôme Géronimi altered the novel’s essential plot element that the women were lesbian lovers in order to arrive at a more electric denouement.

Wealthy Christina (played by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot) owns a boarding school for boys, which her sadistic headmaster husband Michel (Paul Meurisse) oversees as if it were a prison for society’s least deserving reprobates. Michel serves spoiled fish to everyone, including his wife, to save on money. He gives his mistress Nicole (Simone Signoret) a black eye when he isn’t sexually abusing Christina in the school’s public spaces. If ever there were a boorish excuse for a man deserving of elimination by the women he mistreats, Michel is it.

Christina and Nicole agree on poison as their method of murder. Clouzot’s dark humor bristles with an indigenously French sensibility. Details of working-class postwar French life adorn every precisely composed scene.

Still, there is more to the cleverly devised narrative than Clouzot lets the audience know until the film’s final moments, and what fiendishly executed moments of disturbing surprise they are. “Diabolique’s” double-punch climax resonates so strongly in the memories of its audience that regardless of how much of the film you forget over time, you never lose touch with its remarkable ending.