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Domestic Disturbance
FILM: Murderous Maids (NR)
DIRECTOR: Jean-Pierre Denis
STARRING: Sylvie Testud, Julie-Marie Parmentier
WHERE: 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, Prytania Theatre, 5339 Prytania St., 891-2787
GRADE: B+
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Sisters Christine (Sylvie Testud) and Lea Papin (Julie-Marie Parmentier) succumb to the indignities of class polarization in the fact-based Murderous Maids, screening Thursday at the Prytania.
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The great Ralph Ellison addressed the issue in
its American racial context in his 1952 masterpiece Invisible Man, namely
the way society can reduce certain of its citizens to a status so lowly that they
are in critical regards unseen. Most of us in the middle class have been party
to such casual degradation. I have attended lunch meetings where conversations
continued as if those serving our plates and pouring our coffee were robots rather
than human beings, have lifted drinks and appetizers off cocktail party trays
as if the food arrived and departed by magic carpet rather than human wait staff.
Director Jean-Pierre Denis' Murderous Maids tells the sad story of two
young women reduced to such invisibility and the frightful rage their powerlessness
nurtured.
The 1933 incident in Le Mans where two domestic servants beat
their employer and her daughter to death with a pewter pitcher has been the
subject of several literary, theatrical and cinematic treatments including books
by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Margaret Atwood, a play by Jean
Genet and the 1994 British film Sister My Sister. Adapted for the screen
here by Denis and Michele Halberstadt from Paulette Houdyer's book L'Affaire
Papin, Murderous Maids is the story of sisters Christine (Sylvie
Testud) and Lea (Julie-Marie Parmentier) Papin, young women put out to domestic
service by their own mother, Clemence (Isabelle Renauld), who cannot seem to
imagine a life for them any different from her own. I am uncertain how much
of what we witness in this film stands as established fact, but it's clear that
Denis endeavors to present a social and psychological context in which two frail
women could explode into an act of such horrific violence.
When their father deserted the family, Christine and an older
sister were sent to live with their aunt. But when the aunt marries, the older
Papin girls are placed in a convent school where the oldest daughter shortly
decides to become a nun. Christine also desires to join the order, but her mother
blocks her acceptance and soon places her into domestic service. Separated permanently
from her older sister, to whom she's always been close, Christine now pledges
to provide her younger sister Lea with more affection and sense of family security
than Christine herself has ever known.
Through her teens Christine cooks, cleans, irons and organizes
for a series of employers, none of whom treat her with proper respect. For the
most part she performs well, but resentment toward her specific and generally
limited circumstances festers not far beneath her resolutely polite manner.
Her refusal to accept having her meager rights abrogated leads to a series of
dismissals. Finally, though, Christine lands employment with a family that seems
to respect her intelligence, industry and privacy. Then, when Clemence puts
Lea into service and Christine convinces the Lincelans to hire her, too, life
for the sisters seems as good as it's likely to get.
Madame Lincelan (Dominque Labourier) is more respectful than
any of Christine's previous employers, but she is still the kind of mistress
who dons a white glove to check the quality of the sisters' cleaning. Worse,
like all the others, Madame Lincelan is careless about concealing from Christine
and Lea her convictions of the superiority of her own class. Manifest in that
way and others, she never sees the girls as fully human. As a result, the sisters
pull ever more into themselves, eventually becoming lovers as well as co-workers,
best friends and sisters. In the final analysis, violence erupts from a desperate
effort to protect the secrecy of their sexual connection.
Murderous Maids offers wise insight
about the thousand slights suffered by the powerless at the hands of the myopic
rich. Employers talk about their servants as if they are deaf, subject them
to inspections as if they are draft animals, self-righteously dock their pitiful
wages for inevitable failings as if anyone, with whatever amount of care, could
achieve perfection. And with time we come to understand that the greatest skill
a person could bring to domestic service is the ability to tolerate humiliation.
The film is a little slow going, but it is
short, and its frankly revealing title enhances its narrative tension. We know
what's coming, but not when. We largely know why but not the immediate provocation
or its aftermath. The picture is very well served by its performances. In a
cinematic universe without Hollywood at its center, we could well imagine Oscar
nominations for Testud in the lead and Parmentier in support. In their separate
ways, both are heartbreaking.
Denis' determined humanity is so extensive
he accomplishes something quite remarkable: he makes an incestuous relationship
understandable. Rather than repel us, we find ourselves actually heartened that,
as in other ways that do not transgress against taboo, these two lonely, otherwise
emotionally destitute women can comfort each other in sexual union. True compassion,
he submits, allows no other response.
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