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Rating:
Having reached yet another Chabrol film, I have confirmed two facts: I understand why many critics consider him one of the most authoritative French directors, and I've confirmed an impression: there is often something unspeakable in Chabrol's cinematic women, a deviation, a marginality compared to the scene, the presence of a radical alienation from the normality of life. The great ability of a sober direction and the depiction of a female world that manages to live madness in the obviousness are the two cornerstone elements of this intense feature film, which the director takes from the novel A Judgement in Stone (La morte non sa leggere, 1977) by Ruth Rendell.
The story is about a housemaid who lives divided between the outward normality of life in a small village near Saint-Malo and an inner universe torn apart by the inability to read (both real and metaphorical). Chabrol follows with an attentive yet neutral eye the gentle and linear flow of events, focusing his lens on details that will gain importance only in the film's final scenes, details that will not reveal anything prematurely. He follows the story of Sophie (a remarkable Sandrine Bonnaire), hired as a housemaid in the bourgeois home of the Lelièvre family, a domestic worker grappling with reading difficulties, not only with the post-its left by the owners on the fridge but also with the social context into which she has been mysteriously (at the beginning of the film, there is an air of agitation that has something mysterious, unexplained) catapulted. Chabrol uses Sophie's illiteracy as a metaphor for a source of negativity, as an inability to read or an intentional refusal of the surrounding world, of that bourgeois world that suffocates and humiliates her, which would not accept her if only they knew of her dyslexia. The acquaintance with the young postwoman of the village, characterizing a hypothetical second act of the film, further exacerbates these feelings, these resentments (to be precise) told mainly through silences and shadows, where every action takes place behind the curtain of an insipid, pretended normality.
The desire for revenge of the two girls forced to live in vile bourgeois antagonism, drowned in luxury and the ostentation of a useless culture, will fully unfold in the film's final scene, where the Lelièvre family, huddled in front of the TV watching Mozart's Don Giovanni, is slaughtered by gunfire amid the hysterical laughter of the two unfortunate girls. A macabre finale that brings out the subtle tension simmering beneath the surface of the entire film. The anomic normality that permeates the entire story - a story wrapped in leaden colors for the entire duration of the film - turns blood red in the final act, giving way to a disturbing conclusion where Sophie, walking away from the Lelièvre villa, passes among the gendarmes who don't notice her: residue at the margins of the sequence, nonsense in the obvious, opacity that remains in transparency.
Someone has talked about a neo-Marxist vision, judging this film as a renewed exploration of themes related to a class struggle that has never subsided, seeing only a change in its social referents. An interpretation, which to me seems plausible but reductive: the element from which the entire body of the film takes its cue is, in fact, eminently psychological: attributing all this importance to the material condition of the two - which is nevertheless highlighted several times by Chabrol's hand - seems misleading. From the beginning, normality is veined by some of Sophie's manic behaviors, her fears that suddenly erupt in scenes of tranquil daily grayness, becoming terror, relentless anguish. Without moving the camera a millimeter, Chabrol knows how to shake our viewer's spine and keeps attention high even in sordidly insignificant passages, such as the scenes where Sophie stuffs herself with chocolate and TV, to avoid thinking about her impairments and her turbulent past, to avoid feeling.
A film that wants to reveal something about our post-modern times and contemporary ailments, which the director seems to suggest, are inextricably linked to the faults of perception. The entire film - that is image, color, sound, therefore sensation - seems to flirt with the idea that today's diseases root themselves in the most unsuspected everyday life, nestling and operating slowly on the senses, replacing the Self with another puppet Self, a phosphoric and illusory Self that once and for all deforms the flow of images and, consequently, of life before our eyes; glances increasingly frightened, increasingly alone, increasingly convinced of what they see and what might not exist.
A film certainly not suitable for playful entertainment, not suitable for spending a pleasant evening in company. A work that must be analyzed carefully, seeking beyond the image a web of meanings and messages that Chabrol suggests through the investigation of his camera, scattering signs throughout the film.
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