The House Next Door

By Ed Howard

Claude Chabrol has always been especially interested in the dynamics of class power, examining the nature of class with a dry, caustic wit. In La cérémonie, this examination plays out in a remote small town where the isolated lower-class maid Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) is hired by the Lelievre family. They're a typical bourgeois family, aloof and condescending. The father, Georges (Jean-Pierre Cassel), is an authoritarian Mozart lover, and his wife Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) is a slightly bitchy control freak, while their kids Melinda (Virginie Ledoyen) and Gilles (Valentin Merlet) are mostly just indifferent. These people aren't evil, they're just wrapped up in themselves, to the point that they virtually ignore Sophie once she's in their house. As Melinda says, they treat the maid like a "robot," but despite Melinda's enlightened pose, she's really no different than the rest of her family, elitist and snooty, at heart concerned only with her own problems.