The Path of Grim Ritual: Anti-Genre Crime Film with Amoral Coding

Nolan 2022-10-15 13:52:03

In 2020, before the outbreak of the "new crown" epidemic, the most eye-catching film was undoubtedly "Parasite", which won numerous laurels. It is an important blueprint for this creation.

Parasite (2019)
8.8
2019 / Korea / Drama Comedy / Bong Joon Ho / Song Kang Ho Lee Sun Kyun

The story of "Grim Ritual" may be roughly described as: a maid with dyslexia, another "proletarian" (or "immoral" who has experienced the same legal trial as the protagonist and is not tolerated by society) played by Pell Under the agitation of "people"), they occupied and destroyed the client's villa, and then the violence of "passionate murder".

Comparing with "Parasite", it is not difficult to find that both films are closely related to class, but "Parasite" seems to be a story of naked class confrontation - the rich are simple-minded and despise the hypocrisy of the lower class. In other words, although the proletarians are morally flawed, their behavioral motivations are based on the stimuli of the proletarians' words and actions. Therefore, the counterattack is "deserved" in the eyes of the audience.

On the other hand, "Grim Ritual" deliberately does not morally encode the apparent class counterpoint elements on the surface of the story, in order to give the narrative more rationality. It can be said that this film has a certain anti-type crime film characteristics. Although the proletarians in the film have an equally thin and rigid imagination of the proletariat, and their rhetoric and aesthetic tastes are also slightly comical, they have no moral problems. In fact, the daughter of the customer has taken care of the dyslexic servant several times, and the solution proposed by the owner when the conflict between the master and the servant arises is also reasonable. On the contrary, the proletarians have obvious moral flaws-as the servants of the proletarians, they only provide food and simple services for the rich, and their "negative news" to the rich is basically provided by the role played by Pell. During the period, the two also ignored the church rules and carried out an "immoral" adventure under the leadership of the latter. Therefore, the irreconcilable contradiction that erupts at the end of the film has nothing to do with the moral sense of class. The crime text constructed by the film is completely different from the moral coding laws generally followed in the creation of genre films, so if you want to enter the story completely, it may be difficult to achieve only with the help of plain empathy logic.

The heroine's dyslexia symptoms and her usual mantra "I don't know" can actually provide us with a subtle path to understand the film - this line has two meanings, one is understood by other characters during the dialogue "Anything/anything is fine", and the second is the real voice of the character in the literal sense - "I don't know". This ambiguous line actually alludes several times to the ineffectiveness of communication between the two classes of master and servant (even between the protagonist and the instigator). In a sense, this film seems to be a "modern miniature version" of the French Revolution: the villas of the rich are like "palaces", and the reason why the proletarians set off a bloody "revolution" is not out of necessity. Therefore, what the film reveals is the unspeakable dangers in modern society that may pour down like a torrent at any time. This has nothing to do with genre narratives, but rather a social truth that the creators intended.

View more about La Cérémonie reviews

Extended Reading

La Cérémonie quotes

  • Georges Lelievre: [referring, respectively, to Sophie the illiterate maid and Jeanne the nosy postal clerk] What a pair: one can't read at all, and the other reads our mail.

  • Man at Melinda's birthday party: Speaking of quotes, I have one that's less famous, but quite troubling. "There are aspects of good people I find loathsome, least of all the evil within them."

    Woman at Melinda's birthday party: My God... Who said that?

    Georges Lelievre: Nietzsche.