A Judgement in Stone

1995 ‘La Cérémonie’ Directed by Claude Chabrol

Sophie, a quiet and shy maid working for the upper-class family Lelievre, hides her illiteracy under the cloak of a perfect household and obedience. She finds a friend in the energetic and uncompromising postmaster Jeanne, who encourages her to stand up against her bourgeois employers.

Sandrine Bonnaire Isabelle Huppert Jean-Pierre Cassel Jacqueline Bisset Virginie Ledoyen Valentin Merlet Julien Rochefort Dominique Frot Jean-François Perrier

Alternative Titles

La cérémonie, 의식, Ceremonin

drama thriller

111 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Matt Mansfield ★★★★★ 3

"I feel sorry for you"
one of the great films about manipulation and belittlement: nonchalantly throwing a dirtied tissue back at the person who provided it without saying thank you; offering to drive someone into town as if it's the noblest thing in the world; finding out someone can't read and instinctively offering to teach them. The rich family treat Sandrine Bonnaire's maid with such casual disdain and dehumanising pity that it's no wonder she's drawn to the chaos of Huppert's character (her total opposite), and it's no wonder the film ends the way it does.
second view and I'm still nowhere near this - but after seeing only two of his films (and this one twice) I'm totally obsessed/in awe of the way Chabrol makes movies.
Review by Amy Andrews ★★★★½ 3

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

All I'm saying is that I would do anything Isabelle Huppert encouraged me to do, and that includes murdering an entire family.
Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½ 2

class struggle being portrayed through methodic structuralism. there is no simple synthesized answer or event that gives way to tragedy, but more an amalgam of tiny symbolic details in the material construction of the film that allows this to flourish as a natural, inevitable conclusion: seeing capitalism as a natural system, in nature’s structure, it is simply fate that gives way to tragedy. not only through the idea of popular and erudite culture, not only through the illiteracy here which is not a problem in a pragmatic way, but a question of belittlement, not only through material privileges, not only through conversational power relations, but through the civic bourgeois manners being given as a holistic system in which morals are absolute and untouchable. well, they are not.
Review by Nick ★★★★

La Ceremonie is another cinema masterpiece on the irreconcilable conflicts between different social classes. Told in the form of a housemaid's personal experience clashing with her high class bourgeois employers, La Ceremonie is extremely restrained, as is characteristic of the European cinema in general. It's all still water until exactly the midway point where two bombshells are dropped out of nowhere, then the uneventful story suddenly puts on a faint sinister glow. It'a an extremely poised build-up of pent-up emotions and mounting tensions, until the very end where a shocking yet still somewhat expectant twist would end the story on a jaw-dropping note. What's most impressive about La Ceremonie is the extremely lowkey yet captivating performances from both Sandrine Bonnaire…
Review by Sarah🖼️🔥 ★★★★★

the French love being homophobic but accidentally making all their movies about lesbians
Review by Luigi ★★★★ 1

no exaggeration but isabelle huppert literally invented acting
Review by M.K. R. ★★★★★ 2

A uniquely disturbing thriller; it seethes with a quiet, cold hatred. Incredibly, Huppert is upstaged—this is one of her rare performances where you can see the acting (a lot of shockingly Streep-ish tics here). Sandrine Bonnaire is the one giving the grand Huppertian performance in this.
First saw this film over a decade ago when I was just starting my "adult" life, and I appreciated it then mainly for its ingeniously novel sources of suspense, like trying to prevent someone from finding out you can't read, etc (also, that terrifying, uncanny valley puppet show). After years of struggling through shitty service jobs and dead end temp positions, and eventually cultivating a polished enough air to slither my way into secretary…
Review by al 🐺 ★★★★½

sandrine's terf bangs really came to end the upper class
Review by ethan 3

isabelle huppert could literally run me over and id still pray on the land she walks on
Review by Rod Sedgwick ★★★★½ 6

My short and curly thoughts:
My first Claude Chabrol film and certainly not my last, is a film that has taunted and haunted me for quite a few days since I watched it. With an Hitchcockian eye and doom-laden build towards it's shocking (but hardly unexpected) finale we are drawn into a deceptively simple plot which sees a maid (Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie) hired by a bourgeois family in the French countryside. Class struggle ensues and when Isabelle Huppert's unpredictable Jeanne enters the fray as a friend to Sophie, the tension ratchets up to its brilliantly staged and bitter end. With a note of Haneke's Funny Games in the proceedings, this Ruth Rendell adaptation is an exercise in subtlety and restraint, but when it barks it damn well bites. Masterful.
Review by John Frankensteiner ★★★★★

Parasite fucking wishes
Review by Brian Formo [Team Godzilla] ★★★★ 2

I know everyone on this site loves Isabelle Huppert and with great reason, she's phenomenal; but although Huppert gets to cut loose in this thriller the whole leap of the finale rests on the ability of Sandrine Bonnaire to pull it off through the entire film. And Bonnaire, a very underrated actress on her own, does. Her illiteracy is used at first for empathy but then Claude Chabrol shows how always attempting to hide the fact that she can't read, shapes and molds her psyochopathic tendencies.
It's a tricky line to walk going from caring for the illiterate maid to then see her cross boundaries in order to keep her secret. And eventually all bets are off and we don't…

Recent reviews

Review by billur ★★★★½

Class struggle gone wild.
Disturbing in a way that should already have to.
Review by anjali_

yeah, yeah
Review by Margatita ★★★★

Supongo que Haneke se inspiró en esta peli para hacer Funny Games
Review by ricardo ★★★★

it rubs me the wrong way how many people are interpreting this movie to be in favor if its main characters when i think it presents a more neutral tone - nobody in this movie is too good (though unfortunately i found myself on the side of the family for like the entire movie?). it's weird that anybody would wanna root for these main characters just because they are lower in class than the bourgeoisie family. they have very little redeeming "moral" qualities to them and the movie constantly reminds us of this. i have a lot of mixed feelings about the outcome / implications of this whole story and should probably rate it lower but beside all of that i actually still really liked it and enjoyed watching so whatever.
Review by João Pedro Gomes ★★★★★

É no mínimo irônico o fato de que, depois de tudo o que essas personagens já fizeram e saíram impunes (“Eles não podiam provar”), esse filme termine com a gravação da chacina que incrimina essas duas mulheres. E o pior de tudo é que essa prova só foi descoberta por conta de um acidente que surgiu do nada, por conta do destino. Já estariam elas então predestinadas ao julgamento desde seus crimes anteriores? Ou seria isso uma punição pelos seus comportamentos não convencionais inerentes às suas classes?
Acontece que essas duas mulheres são assassinas; são ignorantes, manipuladoras, desprezíveis. Porém elas também são subversivas, não pensam ou agem de acordo com a ordem burguesa vigente, estão socialmente desnudadas, não devem nada…
Review by ponycoat ★★★★★

my kinda chick flick
Review by Kevin Royal Johnson ★★★★★

Top tier Chabrol, a darkly comic neo-noir that only improves with age. On this viewing, I was taken with the almost comic swiftness of the editing, which carries along the narrative's psychological plunge like a car careening down the side of a mountain.
Artificial Eye blu-ray.
Review by Pablo Knote ★★★½

Das Spätwerk des ehemaligen Nouvelle Vague-Regisseurs Claude Chabrol gewinnt seine Qualität aus seiner eigentümlich ambivalenten Erzählhaltung. Augenscheinlich bleibt der Film in zwischenmenschlichen Dynamiken und psychologischer Charakterzeichnung verhaftet, erzählt darüber hinaus aber subtil von Klassengegensätzen, die im Laufe der Handlung immer mehr an die Oberfläche dringen.
Mehr noch als in Bong Joon-hos "Parasite" stellt Chabrol die reiche Familie im Zentrum als solidarische, liebevolle Gemeinschaft dar, zeichnet den Umgang mit ihrem Dienstmädchen Sophie (der hervorragenden Sandrine Bonnaire in einer Performance voller enigmatischer Abgründigkeit) als betont umsichtig und großmütig. Immer mehr bröckelt dann diese Schicht aus Toleranz auf und enthüllt den Überlegenheitskomplex einer weltfremden Schicht, die sich in subtil-beiläufigen Interaktionen, in allzu gut gemeinter Gönnerhaftigkeit abzeichnet.
Wie um aus dieser auf sie projizierten…
Review by goregoreboy ★★★★★

In the words of Miss Britney Spears: thank you Karl Marx! The only thing I sort of missed was more violence so if it was more twisted like Funny Games by Haneke, then it'd get 5.5 stars out of 5.
Review by David2 ★★★★

J’imaginais pas Chabrol comme ça, violent j’avais presque l’impression de voir du Haneke.
Netflix
Review by melilie ★★★½

théâtrale
Review by Devan Scott ★★★★½

Be Crime Do Crime