Analyzing La Cérémonie Film for Revolutionary Themes Relating to Socio-economic Class

La Cérémonie
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Analyzing La Cérémonie for Revolutionary Themes
In this film, Claude Chabrol tells the story of Sophie Bonhomme (Sandrine Bonnaire), who goes to work for the Lelièvre family as a maid (Chabrol et al., 1995). The director adapts La Cérémonie from a novel by Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone (1977), and loosely reflects Lea Papin and Christine`s case of 1933. The two French maids who killed a daughter and a wife to their employer, with their story later inspiring Jean Genet`s film “The Maids,” where he insinuated that he did not favor the maids, but a narrative of personal affinity drove him to air the story (Edwards & Reader, 2001). The director captures Sophie`s story while ventilating on the socio-economic class war between the rich (the Lelièvres) and the poor (the maid, Sophie).
The maid was a 19th-century symbolic social figure who was considered by the wealthy (bourgeois) to threaten the status quo or represent a source of revolt against the upper social class. The maid often appears on-screen while in distress and seems to exude a miserable social and economic status. She often finds herself in a position to rebel against her immediate oppressor, her employer, to achieve social and economic freedom. In contemporary French cinemas like La Ceremonie, the revolution is usually tragic, ending in deaths, or in fortunate circumstances, they degenerate into subtle resistance.
Sophie is received into the Lelièvres home by Mrs. Catherine, who is the mistress of the house. The family consists of Georges Lelièvres (Catherine`s husband), Gilles (Catherine`s son), and Melinda (George`s daughter). Sophie arrives at the home as a naïve and timid servant being shown her spac...