DAISY MILLER 1974

“Such, my angels, is the role of sex in history”

                                                          The Lion in Winter (1968) 

Well, someone could certainly write a book (and a heavy tome it would be) about the role of sex in Hollywood history. Especially when it comes to the influence libidinal urges have had on casting decisions, the role sex and romantic entanglements have played in the launching and ruination of careers.

During award season, when film industry types enjoy engaging in conspicuously self-serious back-patting sessions about the artistry, bravery, and courage it takes to get their creative visions to the screen...one would assume that all of moviemaking is a meritocracy. That people rise and fall by measure of professional merit, and that all decisions relative to the making of a motion picture are decisions based on talent and ability exclusively. 

Closer to the truth is that Hollywood is more of insiders club and that a great many decisions—particularly those relative to casting—emanate from below the belt. The Hollywood paradigm has traditionally been that of a patriarchic boys' club built upon cronyism, nepotism, and cliques. Its inherent misogyny, racism, and sexism feeding into the normalizing of a kind of “vertical casting couch” sensibility when it comes to the relationship between those in power (male producers and directors) and those with relatively little (actresses). 

Few behind-the-scenes Hollywood clichés are as enduring and tiresomely pervasive as that of the movie director who falls in love/lust with his leading lady. Whether it be infatuation (George Sidney and Ann-Margret: Bye Bye Birdie), obsession (Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren: The Birds, Marnie), love affair (Clint Eastwood and well…everybody), or subsequent matrimony (Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)—the faces change, but the particulars have the same weary ring: movie contact = movie contract. (I’ll save the male-on-male wing of this phenomenon [director Luchino Visconti and Helmut Berger] for another time.)

An inevitable phase of these soundstage passions as they blossom into romantic love is when the father-figure/mentor is inspired to star his muse/protégé in a work of classical literature. Paramount head Robert Evans acquired the rights to The Great Gatsby for wife Ali MacGraw before she made a literal getaway with her The Getaway co-star Steve McQueen, summarily ending both her marriage and her career. Roman Polanski had a dream of casting wife Sharon Tate as the ruined heroine of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles before her tragic death.
Director Peter Bogdanovich garnered considerable bad press when, during the making of The Last Picture Show he fell in love with model-turned-screen-ingenue Cybill Shepherd and wound up leaving his then-pregnant wife Polly Platt (the film’s production designer) and their toddler daughter. The flames of Bogdanovich's and Shepherd's already highly-publicized Svengali scandal were further fanned when the director decided to star his lady love as the title character in a movie version of Henry James’ Daisy Miller. 

Cybill Shepherd as Annie P. "Daisy" Miller

Barry Brown as Frederick Forsyth Winterbourne

Cloris Leachman as Mrs. Ezra B. Miller

Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Walker

Mildred Natwick as Mrs. Costello

Duilio Del Prete as Mr. Giovanelli

Adapted from Henry James’ 1879 novella, Daisy Miller tells the story of a headstrong, over-indulged young lady from Schenectady, New York traveling Europe with her family in 1876. The Miller family: vivacious, gadabout Daisy (Shepherd), bratty little brother Randolph (James McMurtry), and distracted mother (Leachman), are a ragingly nouveau riche clan and the walking embodiment of the Ugly American. Uncurious, unsophisticated, and forever talking about everything being so much better back home; appearances brand them modern and out-of-step with antiquated formalities, but in actuality they are simply primitive.

It is Daisy, however (no one calls her by her given name, Annie), imbued with enough beauty, charm, and convivial graces to mitigate her shortcomings, who has learned to turn her forthright baseness into a kind of performance art. A mass of flirtatious affectations and frilly adornments, Daisy is a perpetual motion machine of restive parasol twirling and fan-fluttering, all choreographed to the trill of her own relentless, mindless chatter.

So thoroughly is Daisy a creature of self-interest, that in the restrictive atmosphere of European society and its rigidly-adhered-to codes of conduct and decorum, her guileless impudence might easily be mistaken for nose-thumbing recklessness at worst, proto-feminist rebellion at best. But of course, given Daisy’s thorough lack of awareness—self or otherwise—what we’re really witness to is a display of America’s top commodity and chief export: entitled arrogance.

Our Daisy as you're most apt to find her...mouth wide open and talking a blue streak

While touring Vevey, Switzerland, Daisy meets American expatriate (the name white immigrants have devised for themselves) Frederick Winterbourne; a formal and reserved young man who has lived abroad so long that he is unaware of how thoroughly he has absorbed and assimilated the repressive manners and moral customs of Europe. Ever the flirt, Daisy takes great pleasure in ruffling Winterbourne’s starchy feathers, heedless of the obvious fact that her actions largely succeed in merely confounding him.

As both parties later descend upon Rome, Winterbourne’s cautious courtship of Daisy both mirrors and is impacted by the pressures of aristocratic propriety. Their principle difficulties arising out of Daisy not caring a whit for social conventions and Winterbourne being fairly ruled by them. Though there is mutual attraction, things keep getting gummed up by the near-constant misunderstanding of overtures and misreading of gestures.

In this beautifully composed shot, Mr. Winterbourne keeps his eye on Daisy (seen in the mirror behind him, talking to the hostess, Mrs. Walker) while Mrs. Miller prattles away to no one in particular. Meanwhile, Randolph amuses himself with the silverware

Daisy’s greatest sin stems from the fact that she’s a self-possessed, fully grown adult who dares to bristle at the 19th-century mandate that says, because she's a woman, she is obliged to conduct herself like a helpless child. The confining affectations of propriety that require women to seek male authorization, maternal escort, or societal consent for even the most innocuous activities don’t sit well with the freewheeling Daisy. Thus, it isn’t long before her penchant for doing just as she pleases results in tongues wagging, invitations withdrawn, and puts her reputation and social standing (such as it is) at risk.

The romantic dilemma this poses for Winterbourne, who keeps company with far too many old gossips and is forever second-guessing himself, is whether the mere appearance of transgression is as damning as the actual thing. Winterbourne hopes Daisy is only a recklessly naïve girl and not the fallen woman everyone believes her to be, but things are not helped by his never thawing out long enough to honestly express his feelings for her. Nor does Daisy drop her flirt-and-tease façade long enough to be as direct with him in her words as she prides herself as being in her actions.

The outcome of Daisy Miller is foretold by the deliberate names of its characters, the combination of daisies and winter evoking images of growth restricted and certain death.

For those of us of a certain age, Daisy Miller is largely remembered as the film that broke Peter Bogdanovich’s three-film boxoffice winning streak: The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, and What’s Up Doc?. And while critics at the time treated it with more kindness than its reputation would suggest, it was nevertheless a film the public found very easy to resist.

Part of this, I think, is attributable to something Bogdanovich references in his commentary on this DVD: that Daisy Miller was made several years before the vogue in Merchant/Ivory-style period picture adaptations of literary classics. But as a member of “the public” who recalls all the magazine covers and gossip columns, I can say that another... and I might add, sizable...reason for resistance to Daisy Miller had a lot to do with the public’s oversaturation with the Svengali/Trilby roadshow Bogdanovich and Shepherd treated us to on talk shows and in the press. 

Innocent flirt or fallen woman?

Bogdanovich likes to believe that people resented the couple’s happiness. Undoubtedly this is true to some degree. But from where I sat, Bogdanovich and Shepherd failed to see how callous and unfeeling their public declarations of love and happiness came across, given that everyone with access to Rona Barrett or Rex Reed knew it came at the cost of betraying a pregnant wife (and artistic collaborator) and abandoning a child.

True love may have been in flower for this “beautiful people” pair, but we common folk merely saw an oft-repeated Hollywood cliché: unprepossessing, neophyte director dumps his lean-years wife for blonde goddess starlet at the first flush of success. 

In addition, the public (as consumers and ticket-buyers) like to think of ourselves as the star-makers...that we are the ones who determine who is and who isn't movie star material. But Bogdanovich had deemed Cybill a star whether we liked it or not and proceeded to shove Cybill down our throats (he produced an ear-torture vanity project LP of his lady love singing songs by Cole Porter), branding her an A-List leading lady before it was even earned.

I’m not sure what Bogdanovich saw when he looked at Cybill Shepherd (likely, the funny, talented actress and singer she eventually grew to be), but at the time, I have to say I saw only a meagerly gifted girl of well-scrubbed attractiveness. She was wonderful in The Last Picture Show, but as a member of a strong ensemble, not star material.

When it was announced that the inexperienced former model was to actually star in Daisy Miller, everyone (except Bogdanovich, apparently) seized on the irony of this well-known Orson Welles idolater, in essence, recreating those scenes in Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane insists upon making his modestly-talented sweetheart into an opera singer for his own ego-driven reasons. So, no...by the time Daisy Miller made it to the screen, the public not only wanted this couple to fail, they needed them to.

While I recognize it’s unfair to judge a film based on the personal lives of the people making it, I’m also not so naïve as not to also understand that the obfuscation of reality and fantasy is the absolute cornerstone of the Hollywood star system. The public’s interest in Elizabeth Taylor’s real-life scandals helped make many an Elizabeth Taylor clunker into a hit (The Sandpiper). In fact, the studios relied upon it. The only time people in the film industry think the merging of private and professional is unjust is when it bites them in the ass at the boxoffice.

Winterbourne: "Wouldn't it be funny if they both were perfectly innocent and
sincere and had no idea of the impression they were creating?"
Mrs. Costello: "No, it wouldn't be funny."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

With Daisy Miller, Peter Bogdanovich has crafted what I feel is a handsomely mounted, exquisitely filmed and costumed, and at times, genuinely moving adaptation of Henry James’ short novel. Uncommonly faithful to its source material, not only are the locations precise, and the actors fit the physical descriptions of their characters to a T, but the script adheres so closely to the text you could actually follow along with the book while watching the film. 

Bogdanovich's cinematic eye is as sharp as ever, and the film never feels sluggish or airless like a great many costume dramas. Daisy Miller is a rarity in period dramas in that it is also very entertaining and watchable. Its flaws are minor, and it plays very much like the old-fashioned period films of Hollywood's Golden Age when sharp storytelling and keen pacing took precedence over the kind of over-referential stiffness that later came to exemplify films of the genre.

Indeed, so much is so ideal about Daisy Miller that it’s rather a shame my only complaint falls on the weakness presented by Daisy herself. The actress portraying her, that is, not the character.

Daisy, making friends and influencing people. Not.

With a great deal of humor and style, Bogdanovich has constructed a semi-tragic comedy of manners that feels like Theodore Dreiser American vulgarity meets Edith Wharton British propriety. He finds ample opportunities to dramatize the contrasts between the dreary Eurocentrism of the Miller family and the studied hypocrisy of Americans abroad who have adopted the customs of the British aristocracy.

Interweaving this with a love story that never can get started, Bogdanovich, who clearly envisions Daisy as something of an early suffragette and feminist, still leaves it up to us to draw our own conclusions as to whether Daisy’s independence is the result of a unique brand of Yankee boorishness or an admirable resistance to senseless social constriction.

This societal drama is sensitively and amusingly played out, but what’s lacking is a Daisy capable of conveying even a hint of why, beneath all the flirting and white-noise chatter, she is worthy of the attention James/Winterbourne/Bogdanovich expend on her.

Watching Daisy Miller, I was left with the impression that the fatal flaw of the film is that Bogdanovich took Shepherd's appeal as a given. Certain that Cybill was "born for the role" and that she and Daisy were one and the same, he simply plops her in front of the camera. Gone is the protective, loving care of the sort lavished on her performance in The Last Picture Show. Here he allows Cybill to merely be Cybill, certain that audiences will find her to be as bewitching as he clearly had found her to be. It's a special talent to be able to project one's personality on the screen. Shepherd, at this point, was simply too green.  

PERFORMANCES

For a brief moment in time, Bogdanovich had wanted to star opposite Shephard in Daisy Miller with Orson Welles directing. While the idea sounds positively bananas, the side of me that loves Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Showgirls kinda wishes it had actually happened.

In considering projects for Shepherd to star in, Bogdanovich stated that it was down to Daisy Miller and Calder Willingham’s 1972 novel Rambling Rose. Rambling Rose was made into a film in 1991 and garnered an Academy Award nomination for its star, 24-year-old Laura Dern.

I bring this up to illustrate why I think Cybill Shepherd’s largely cosmetic performance in Daisy Miller is what ultimately stops it from being the film it could have been. Shepherd and Dern were roughly the same age when making these films; both stories are about naïve young women who innocently threaten the pervasive social structure. 

Somber Barry Brown, who committed suicide in 1978, gives the film's best performance;
his sad-eyed melancholy fairly aching to be relieved by the life force that is Daisy

Going by type alone, Cybill Shepherd would have been well-cast as Rose, just as Dern would have made a fine Daisy Miller. But to look at what these two actresses do with the roles they were ultimately given is to understand the subtle but lethal difference between capable amateur and gifted professional.

Shepherd is not awful in Daisy Miller, she does have her moments. But her performance is largely external and superficial. Saddled with a character who never shuts up and a director fond of long single takes, Shepherd obviously had her hands full. Thus Shepherd can't be faulted if (as my partner noted with his usual perspicacity), after delivering--in machine gun rap--what must be page upon page of dialogue and hitting all those marks, she invariably resorts to hoisting that prominent chin of hers and adopting a look of smug self-satisfaction at having simply made it through the whole thing without having made a mistake. It's clear she's doing the best that she can. Nuance of performance be damned, she remembered it all!

Try as she might, lovely Cybill Shepherd has but a single, all-purpose expression to offer the camera when it comes in for a close-up. Ideal for magazine covers, it's a non-look that communicates considerably less than Bogdanovich thinks

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As literary heroines go, I find Daisy Miller to be a captivating (if exasperating) heartbreaker. I loved her on the printed page, her deceptively complex, out-of-step-with-the-times character fitting in with the women I fell in love with in Far From The Madding Crowd, Madame Bovary, Sister Carrie, and Anna Karenina. Perhaps because I liked the book so much and because Bogdanovich’s adaptation is so glowingly faithful to it, I can overlook the shortcomings I have about Cybill Shepherd in the role.

As I’ve stated, the film can be very moving at times (I get waterworks at the end, no matter how many times I see it), so perhaps, when I relinquish my desire for what Daisy could have been and allow myself to enjoy THIS Daisy (Shepherd is not without her charm), the emotions and thwarted romance of the story are able to reach my heart.

Mildred Natwick is a real delight in her brief scenes. This amusingly well-turned-out bathhouse is just one of many examples of Bogdanovich adding visual interest to dialogue-heavy sequences

Staying true to his devotion to creating a kind of Orson Wells-type repertory company of actors, Bogdanovich features in Daisy Miller many of the players from The Last Picture Show. Eileen Brennan and Duilio Del Prete went on to join Shepherd in Bogdanovich's next feature, the equally ill-fated At Long Last Love.

Had I seen Daisy Miller when it was released, I'm fairly certain I would have disliked it. In the heat of huge 1974 releases like Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, The Great Gatsby, Mame, The Towering Inferno, and countless disaster films and Oscar contenders (1974 was a biggie!), I'm afraid I wouldn't have appreciated Daisy Miller's small-scale virtues.

When it comes to watching the film today, I'd be lying if I said it didn't mitigate matters considerably, knowing that time and cruel fate have mellowed what once seemed so obnoxious and insufferable about Hollywood's "It" couple (Peter & Cybill) and my feelings about the project as a whole. 

It's easier to recognize and appreciate what a talented director Peter Bogdanovich is when he's not telling us so. Likewise, knowing that Cybill Shepherd went out and studied and ultimately matured into a very good actress and comedienne, that I like her introspective take on her younger self (her autobiography Cybill Disobedience is a great read), and respect her political activism; well...it all goes a long way toward getting me to relinquish my dogged resistance to her professional inexperience as Daisy and simply enjoy the many pleasures this film has to offer.
Funny how time has the power to work that kind of magic.

BONUS MATERIAL

When in Rome, Daisy and her family stay at The Hotel Bristol. Which also happens
 to be the name of the fictional hotel where Barbra Streisand wreaks havoc in What's Up, Doc? 

Cybill Shepherd wrote a bestselling autobiography in 2000 

"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or interfere with anything I do."

 Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017

THE CEREMONY (La Cérémonie ) 1995

The rich are always with us. And if you’re a resident of Los Angeles, the acute inevitability of their presence and ubiquitous cultural sway is perhaps even more keenly felt than anywhere else. I’ve always envisioned my attitude toward the rich as being positioned somewhere between ambivalence and indifference; certainly not impressed by wealth, but neither envious nor begrudging of affluence and those who hold money in worshipful esteem. 

Of course, this moderate stance has shifted considerably amidst today’s political climate of wealth-as-god, legitimizer of systemic cruelty, and validate of all human worth. America has always harbored a rather twisted attitude towards the well-to-do; the poor being so enamored of the wealthy that they consistently vote against their own best interests in order to protect the fortunes of the “haves” (whom they irrationally envision as guardians of the well-being of the “have-nots.”) The historical reality of hoarded and generational wealth in America has never proved much of a match for the durability of people’s belief in the myth of the American Dream.

More to my liking and closer to my own feelings has been the attitude towards the rich reflected in European films. While American movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Gatsby can’t seem to make up their minds as to whether they’re repulsed or enthralled by rapacious capitalism; European directors like Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard share a singular lack of ambivalence on the topic. Often depicting the rich as parasitic exploiters casually unaware/unconcerned with the plight of others, these directors harbor what I perceive as a healthy disdain for wealth and the  values of the bourgeoisie.

The post-election fallout of 2016 has left me with a faintly intensified antipathy towards the rich, manifesting itself in ways that are exasperatingly reactive and frustratingly internal. For example, I’ve caught myself eye-rolling to the point of strain every time I find myself witness to yet another retail establishment outburst by some “I demand good service!” type sporting one of those I’d-like-to-speak-to-the-manager haircuts and the look of entitled righteousness.
The only truly external reaction to the wealthy I exhibit—and mind you, I’m bearing no pride in confessing this—is one both petty and passive-aggressive. And therefore, enormously gratifying. My shame is that I’m one of those L.A. drivers more than happy to allow cars to merge and cut in on the freeway…unless I see it’s a luxury automobile: in which case, I tend to let Herr Mercedes and Monsieur Maserati fend for themselves.

Whatever name one attributes to these feelings, however irrational, whatever their degree of latency or full-blown realization; these emotions represent the seeds of festering resentment and contempt at the center of Claude Chabrol’s masterful (and rivetingly intense) psychological thriller La Cérémonie.

Isabelle Huppert as Jeanne

Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie Bonhomme

Jacqueline Bisset as Catherine Lelievre

Jean-Pierre Cassel as Georges Lelievre

Virginie Ledoyen as Melinda Lelievre

In truth, to describe La Cérémonie as a psychological thriller or even frame its narrative in terms of mere class warfare is to diminish the complexity of this layered culture collision. Adapted by Chabrol & Caroline Eliacheff from the 1977 novel A Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell; La Cérémonie is a compelling thriller whose revealed mysteries and shifting focus of empathy and identification keep the viewer ever on their guard and off balance.

La Cérémonie is a cause-and-effect tragedy in which characters who should never meet are nevertheless brought together by chance and fateful incident (past and present) that cruelly conspire to bring about the most dreaded of outcomes. The film's action proceeds steadily and inexorably on an increasingly troubling course of good intentions gone wrong and fates sealed by bad luck. 

The setup is so good, and the pervading atmosphere of dread so strong, watching La Cérémonie was like assembling a jigsaw picture puzzle whose final image you really don’t want to see.

And indeed, from its initial scenes (which on repeat viewing reveal themselves to be chock full of telltale clues and hints) La Cérémonie establishes itself as a puzzle.

As the film opens, wealthy Catherine Lelièvre (Bisset), chic manager of an art gallery and wife of industrialist Georges Lelièvre (Cassel), is interviewing a potential live-in housekeeper. The applicant, one Sophie Bonhomme (Bonnaire) is a wan, taciturn type who, while suitably experienced, nevertheless comes across as slightly odd. There’s something subtly out-of-step about her behavior. Under the circumstances, it's behavior that could easily be attributed to nerves or an indication of blunt efficiency.
Still, there’s a hint of something constrained and impervious in Sophie’s manner (the questions she asks, the halting vagueness of her responses) that makes her eventual engagement by the Lelièvres (rounding out the household: teenage Gilles and college-age Melinda, only there on weekends) feel less like the longed-for solution to a housekeeping problem than the unwitting opening of a Pandora’s Box of trouble.

Infiltration of Ignorance
Georges fails to find the installation of a new multi-channel satellite dish
to be as enthralling as stepson Gilles (Valentin Merlet). 

Sophie’s entrance to the Lelièvre household, a spacious mansion in the secluded French countryside coincides with the hooking up of an enormous—by 1995 standards—television to a satellite dish. Atrivial detail Chabrol wryly uses as juxtaposed commentary. The acquisition of this time-killing, emotion-benumbing “100 channels of nothing” device augers a threat as insidious and destructive to this erudite, cultured family as the arrival of their detached and uncurious housekeeper.

Once ensconced, Sophie proves a tireless worker, albeit emotionally undemonstrative and idiosyncratic in oddly discomfiting ways. I.e., she refuses to use the dishwasher, keeps the house immaculate save for the books in the library, and her spare hours are spent indulging in sweets and staring transfixed at the small TV in her room. In another time, Sophie’s remote demeanor would be a non-issue, her status as servant unequivocally branding her “beneath” her employers; the significance of her existence determined by and limited to how well she carries out the duties of her job.

But this story is set in the mid-‘90s, when the rich have mastered the subtle art of treating the hired help as though they are members of the family while still making abundantly clear that by no means are they actually equals. 

Like a vampire at the portal of a church, Sophie finds herself unable to enter the family's library

Given Chabrol’s traditional unsympathetic depiction of the bourgeoisie, the Lelièvres appear at first to be implicated in this tale of suppressed class warfare; but they are shown to be an affectionate, kind, and intelligent family (the sound of their name even suggesting “book”). They’re the type of aware, well-intentioned rich folk who debate over what to call the housekeeper (Maid? Servant? Domestic?) and grapple with the fine line between being caring and being patronizing (they offer to pay for Sophie’s driving lessons and prescription glasses). 

If they're guilty of anything, it’s a kind of selective, blithe obliviousness characteristic of privileged classes whose wealth affords the luxury of a blinkered world-view (Catherine: “You know I don’t read the papers”) and a casual self-centeredness that puts their personal concerns before consideration of others.

There are several marvelous moments when the Lelièvres exhibit near-imperceptible displays of class superiorityz: Catherine conducts the entire job interview detailing what she needs in a housekeeper, completely forgetting to tell Sophie how much she'll be paid...as though earning a living wage was not the first and foremost concern of someone seeking work. Similarly, Catherine treats Sophie's requiring a day off as a personal irritation, with little thought given to Sophie having and needing a life of her own. Meanwhile, Georges, the autocrat, watches Sophie with a coldly judgmental eye, and even Melinda, the college-age champion of the downtrodden, has a telling moment involving the careless disposal of a borrowed handkerchief. 

"I know about you."
That line is repeated frequently in this film obsessed with secrets, gossip, and the past 

But suppose affluence breeds a relative disinterest in the world beyond its immediate environs. In that case, its lack can be said to foster a fixation on the comings and goings of the moneyed set that whiplashes between overawed captivation and bilious resentment.

This attitude is exemplified by Jeanne (Huppert), the town postmistress, chief gossip, and all-around troublemaking busybody who insinuates herself into the closed-off life of Sophie. Initially drawn to one another out of mutual exploitation, then ultimately, a shared, intuitively divined psychosis; the bonding of these women of no consequence evolves (a la Shelly Duvall & Sissy Spacek in 3 Women) into the pair becoming something together that neither could be on their own.

Feeding off of one another—Sophie supplying Jeanne with gossipy access to the Lelièvre family, for whom she bears a grudge for real and imagined slights; Jeanne giving voice and rebellious action to Sophie’s suppressed disaffection—they are mob mentality in microcosm and cultural catharsis at its most horrific.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m mad about good thrillers, but with La Cérémonie I’ve hit the trifecta. It’s a rollicking good suspenser that keeps tightening the screws of tension with each scene and unexpected reveal. It’s also an unusually perceptive character drama and dark-hued study in abnormal psychology. And lastly, it’s a sharp-toothed, sinister social critique.

When La Cérémonie was released in 1995, TV’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, that long-running, vomitous exercise in wealth fetishism, was in its 11^th and final season. I never could figure out who the audience for that show was, but a little bit of Chabrol cynicism was the perfect antidote for America’s steady diet of “wealth is good!” mythologizing (which, perversely enough, goes head-to-head with that other American myth: the one devoted to reassuring the poor and unsophisticated they are happier and better off that way). 

Like One of The Family

American audiences have always been able to absorb narratives about class resentment and social conflict when the downtrodden and oppressed individual depicted are white. Our culture is used to humanizing the white experience, making class-revenge dramas like The Servant, Gosford Park, The Maids, and Downton Abbey painless and entertaining.
Conversely, the Black experience is traditionally depicted in American films in ways designed to comfort and reassure white audiences. There's a great deal of national guilt and resistance attached to being asked to understand and empathize with Black rage and resentment, thus, if an American version of La Cérémonie were to be made with Black actors in the Huppert and Bonnaire roles, the result would likely be so explosive as to spearhead a national panic.

The Bane of the Bourgeois: Service Worker Insolence.
Georges is convinced Jeanne opens his family's mail 

PERFORMANCES

Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers are so well-constructed that I tend to overlook how often I find his casting choices to be a tad on the bland side (Robert Cummings? Farley Granger? Diane Baker?) and the acting variable. Claude Chabrol (dubbed the French Hitchcock, a title more convenient than accurate) has well-constructed films, too, but he also had a gift for getting the best out of actors. So much so that even his weaker efforts (Masques, Ten Days Wonder) are salvaged by their delicate and detailed performances. 

Le Boucher (1970) may be a favorite Chabrol film, but a very close second is the more accessible La Cérémonie; a film distinguished by its intelligent screenplay, deftly handled dramatic tension, and superlative cast.

In 1974 Cassel and Bisset co-starred in Murder on the Orient Express  
and in 1991 (rather presciently) a comedy TV-movie titled The Maid

Jacqueline Bisset has grown more beautiful with age, and in this (my first time seeing her in a French-language film) she gives an aware performance that fits like a glove with that of the always-excellent Jean-Pierre Cassel. The members of the Lelièvre family are depicted in a natural way, devoid of caricature, making their subtle hypocrisies as keenly felt as the genuine intimacy and affection they share.

Isabelle Huppert appeared in seven of Claude Chabrol's films.
Chabrol died in 2010 at the age of 80

But the obvious standouts are Isabelle Huppert (whose gift is making us interested in, and maybe even understand, characters we’d otherwise find reprehensible), and Sandrine Bonnaire. First off, Huppert is a force of nature and makes any film she acts in exponentially better the minute she appears; but Bonnaire’s performance is equally rimpressive. Unfamiliar with the actress, I was so struck by the way she made her character’s silences so eloquent. Her Sophie carries around a lifetime of humiliations she struggles to conceal, some horrific, others pitiable; but she’s positively chilling in her lack of self-pity. Also in her conveyance of the kind of pent-up anger evident in certain kinds of children who, when confronted with things they don’t understand or can’t access, resort to a kind of self-protective belligerence.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

One of the reasons revisiting La Cérémonie proves so gratifying to me is because it feels like a curiously relevant movie in our current social climate. The film touches on themes like anti-intellectualism and the baseless fear of the unfamiliar. It brushes against the kind of resentful envy you read about in this day of social media, where people preoccupy themselves with the lives of others, only to come to resent those very lives they imagine to be happier and more fulfilling than their own. It comments upon the way people hypocritically lean on the superficial balm of religion, and explores the futility of trying to escape one’s past.

The film makes reference to how easily we pacify ourselves with television. We don’t learn anything from it, we don’t really watch it so much as lose ourselves in it. All it asks for is our undivided attention, and in exchange it helps benumb us to the pain of thinking, remembering, or feeling.

But mostly La Cérémonie (apparently an archaic term for the act of executing someone for a capital crime) offers an image of insanity that is infinitely saner than the world I’ve been waking up to since November 8^th, 2016. I was in the perfect frame of mind to see a film that framed the rich in a context of inconsequence, impotence, and unwitting perniciousness. I needed the horror. And while Chabrol films it all ambiguously and with a great deal of anticipation and élan, the ultimate effect of this remarkable thriller was like shock treatment. It jolted me so that I actually felt relaxed for the first time in ages.

“There are many things I find loathsome in men, but least of all the evil within them.”

                                                                                                Nietzche

BONUS MATERIAL

Jacqueline Bisset & Jean-Pierre Cassel / 1974  and 1995
Murder on the Orient Express / Le Ceremonie

  Virginie Ledoyen & Isabelle Huppert reunited in Francois Ozon's 8 Women (2002)

Themes similar to those in Le Ceremonie can be found in Jean Genet's The Maids.
The 1975 film adaptation starred Glenda Jackson and Susannah York

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017