The Culturist Film Club: La Cérémonie on October 4
On Monday, September 28, The Culturist Film Club returns to Alliance Française in Dubai where I will present and screen Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie, starring Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire. It is an adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s thriller A Judgment in Stone, and is considered as one of the best crime films of all time.
Date and time: Sunday, October 4 at 3.00pm
Ticket: AED 35 (AED 25 free for Alliance Française members). Book your ticket here.
Location: Alliance Française, Dubai (location map)
LA CÉRÉMONIE
Claude Chabrol, 1995, 112 min
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel
French with English subtitles
Claude Chabrol’s 49th feature stands as the crowning achievement of his prolific career—a coolly riveting study of class dynamics, the psychology of crime, and the sordid secrets lurking beneath the veneer of everyday life. A fascinatingly enigmatic, César Award–winning Isabelle Huppert is the chaotic yin to Sandrine Bonnaire’s tightly coiled yang. They are, respectively, a small-town postal worker and a maid to a wealthy family, a pair of outsiders who form a mysterious alliance that gradually, almost imperceptibly, goes haywire. With a master’s control of sound, editing, and suspense, Chabrol constructs a tour de force of sustained tension that delivers each brilliant shock with ice-pick precision. — Criterion
“France's master of suspense, Claude Chabrol, relishes every malevolent, icily controlled shot of this perfectly constructed thriller, right up to its terrifying, violent climax…But this is a psychological thriller, not class war, with a creepy, fierce friendship at its heart. Is Sophie falling under the spell of the charismatic Jeanne? Or is something frightening afoot? Chabrol's genius is that the pair's strangeness falls entirely within the realms of acceptable – if odd – behaviour, while inching towards an unholy finish.” — Cath Clarke, The Guardian
