The Ritual of Cold is a 1995 film by French New Wave director Claude Chabrol. Claude Chabrol is known as the Hitchcock of France. He is good at expressing some things he has always loved, such as the two sides of bourgeois life, in the way of crime films. face of life. The dialectical relationship between good and evil, and the tragic sense of death. This film is adapted from Ruth Rendell's novel, and the name of the novel is A JUDGMENT IN STONE "The Housekeeper's Mind". In this quintessentially Chabrol-esque film, Chabrol creates tension with great sophistication. He imperceptibly elevates tension from scene to scene, drawing audiences to focus on the slow plot, and finally to a destructive ending, and there's a sense of irony in it.
The film is set in the Brittany Peninsula in northern France, and a middle-class couple, played by Jean-Pierre Cassel and Jacqueline Bissette, hires a pale-faced woman, Sophie. (Sandrina Bernell) As a servant in their secluded home, this ghostly woman performs her job with great efficiency, seemingly without the approval of her employer, nor in the role of the usual. The flattering maid role in the sense of the word, and her middle-class employers are happy with that. Sophie has a secret of her own, she can't read or write; she later befriends Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), a girl who works in the town's post office. Jeanne has a mental problem, has a problem with her work, unpacks letters from her employer, and is also suspected of killing her young daughter; and Sophie is also suspected of killing her father. Jeanne often provokes Sophie's hatred for her employer, and she even debunked Sophie's employer's emails without permission. Attracted by their own sociopathic desires, the two women forge a sinister alliance and extend their tentacles to the smug middle-class representative of the Le Lifu family.
First up is the heroine, our Sophie, in an interview in a café with Madame Lelièvre, who can be noticed during the interview as she removes her previous employer's documents from her bag , accidentally brought out a brown plastic packaging with noir written on it, which is the packaging of chocolate.
00-02-16 Chocolate
After that, Sophie's fondness for chocolate was shown many times in the film. Chocolate is known to be a pleasurable and stress-relieving food. From this, you can guess whether there is something hidden under Sophie's serene appearance?
When Mrs. Leleaf and her family talked on TV about the arrival of a housekeeper, her husband,
When Mr. Leleaf heard that the housekeeper's name was Sophie, he said, "Unfortunate!" It was a joke, making fun of the maid who had no brains in her eyes but had the name Sophie.
00-06-26 The family's "comment" to Sophie
The following "comments" on Sophie appeared many times, questioning Sophie's IQ. The last time was when I learned that Sophie was an alphabète who could not read and write, or what we call illiterate. At the same time, he suddenly realized why Sophie hung up the phone and didn't help him get the documents, because she couldn't read.
00-10-24 The first illiterate foreshadowing
On the way Mrs. Leleaf picked Sophie home, Mrs. Leleaf asked Sophie to take the cigarette, when he opened the drawer and was silent for a few seconds. It can be seen from this that she was nervous and had something in her heart at that time.
00-14-14 Study room
When Mrs. Leleaf showed Sophie to visit the house, Sophie was the only one who did not go in the study. She stood by the door and hesitated to enter. Later, Mr. Leliffe also complained that Sophie did not clean the study, which shows that Sophie was nervous at this location.
01-44-36 Shooting Bookshelf
I would like to add that Sophie is still very inferior to her illiterate problem through the ending of the film through this screen. She has been hiding it from her partner.
00-27-11 Signature
After receiving the goods from the deliveryman, she was asked to sign, and she did not sign under various excuses. Finally, the deliveryman took her hand to sign.
00-43-21 Voyeur Jeanne on the phone
Asking Jeanna to help place the order, on the grounds that the phone was out of order, it can be seen that she was afraid of Jeanna finding out, and she remembered the contents of the phone in her heart.
00-28-49 Pretend to be literate
Going to the nearby supermarket to buy the leftover items and pretending to be literate, the Sophie we saw was a person who would inadvertently say I don't know (Je ne sais pas.) before answering, which gave a strange feeling. Jeanne brought the postcard sent by Melinda, and Sophie also used the excuse of not having glasses and asked others to read it out. It is worth mentioning that it is natural to reiterate Jeanna's identity as a postman, and the plot is in line with the previous promise that the Leleaf family made to Sophie when they left home on vacation, and sent a postcard to her. There are many such details, such as the description of the shotgun,
This picture shows Sophie's attention to Mr. Leliffe's gun, so that the appearance of the last murder tool is not abrupt.
00-36-15 Car repair
00-37-27
The scene where Melinda helps Jeanne repair her car fits Sophie's car accident at the end. Funny thing the director arranged for the final perpetrator to be the priest. Here, Melinda asked Jeanne to borrow a piece of toilet paper. After using it, she threw the tissue into Jeanne's car, which provokes Jeanne's dissatisfaction, so she asked Sophie to spy on Melinda, which led to a series of horrible things. happened.
New wave film directors have their own set of classic shooting methods. Although the directors rarely show off their skills in this film, there are also many classic shots. For example, the scene where Mr. Leleaf appeared with a gun was actually reflected by the transparent glass on the door. The director's settings for light and shadow here. Accurately capture the scene of Sophie leaving. The behavior of the two people appears in the picture in a left-right displacement. About the theme to be reflected in the film. It's something I've never understood. Most people's comments on Chabrol are revealing the hypocrisy of the middle class.... To be honest it's hard to see in this film, if anything, I would say that his unintentional display makes this film less subjective Judging anyone is really just a demonstration of each character's character. In the film when people don't want to communicate anymore, it seems that the only solution is the little glowing box.
01-50-03 Ending
The film ends with a close-up of Sophie staring into the distance. The end of a story can be represented by dénouement. In fact, the origin of the word is to untie the knot. From the first act of the film, Sophie walked into the story with a soldier's marching pace, to the icy face left in the final shot, our story has opened up all its knots and gained momentum. What is left for us is the sound of gunshots that seems to be lingering in our ears, and Sophie's last sentence: "Everything went well, we did a good job." At the end of the film, Chabrol cross-edited Mozart's opera and the shooting scene together. , while shocking the bloody sins, also gave them biblical moral comfort.
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