From the very beginning, Chabrol kept setting up "traps" and burying "explosives".
For example: Madam led Sophie to introduce the basic situation of her home, and she was introduced to the study. Madam stood in the middle of the study. Sophie stood at the door and did not go in. She just looked around the study./Sophie was the first time she finished cooking and serving food , The host said "I still need to teach her how to serve food" / The daughter said to the host "You deliberately put a TV in her room to make her stupid" / About learning to drive, the host wants to send Sophie to learn to drive In response to his attitude, he said, "Is this not authoritarian?" The son said, "I am not authoritarian but sensational."
Until the middle of the film, during the family dinner for his daughter's birthday, Chabrol asked a man who came as a guest to reveal the most critical clues of the film in a scene most accustomed to the French middle class (talking about literature, talking about art, and talking about philosophy). He said, "There are many things in good people that disgust me, and of course these things are not evil in them." This is what Nietzsche said in the chapter "The Pale Criminal" in The Saying of Zarathustra. There is also a paragraph that says "You should say "enemies" instead of "villains"; you should say "patients" instead of "rogues"; you should say "fools" instead of "sinners". .
So what is not "evil" in the "good people" (middle class family) that is detested by the villains/rascals/sinners "Sophie & Jade Pei'er"? Chabrol had already explained it very clearly in the first half. Nietzsche has such a passage in "The Will of Power": "Have you ever thought, when we express our joy, are it good for others? Will it make others unwilling or sad? Is there any insult to others? Is it based on the suffering and disasters of others? Does it arouse others' retaliatory heart?"
The owner and his family unconsciously planted the explosives of resistance in Sophie’s heart. Chabrol used a "Chekhov's gun" to explain the foreshadowing of Sophie's last actions and kept the whole story and atmosphere in the same place. In a state of anxiety and tension, the string music used in the soundtrack also makes the audience feel depressed and uneasy at all times.
The appearance of Yu Pei'er, a comrade who is also on the same class front, took Sophie to recognize the hypocrisy of the rich (donating tattered clothes) and the exploitation of the rich (still working for the birthday of the master’s daughter on Sunday). Recognize the depravity of the rich (the hostess's gallery is actually picking up guests)... She is like a match, constantly inciting Sophie to ignite explosives.
Chabrol kept the suspense very well with a little bit of inconspicuous details, while letting everything have a solid inner logic until the final contradiction broke out. In the same line as Hitchcock.
Chabrol was too cruel, no one escaped his strafe, the people inside-some were stupid, some were bad, some were stupid and bad. Everything seems ridiculous in the singing of "Don Juan".
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