(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome back to "Hit Factory." Podcast about the films of the 1990s, their politics, and how they inform today's film landscape. I'm Aaron. - I'm Carly. - And today we are joined by a good friend of the show, host of "Junk Filter Podcast," and now I believe tied for most guest appearances on "Hit Factory," the inimitable Jesse Hawkins is back on the program. Jesse, how you doing today? - Yeah. - I'm good. How are you guys? - Good. - That's the short version. - The short version. We're doing great. We're better now that we have you in the studio with us today, ready to talk about a fantastic film, a French film. We are wading into international waters, which we don't do often enough. We've tried to do more of. But specifically with our French-speaking comrades across the pond and their national cinema, we haven't ventured here very much, largely because it's intimidating, I think. It's a lot, a rich history of cinema, a rich history of a country, and thankfully we have an expert like you, Jesse, to be here today to illuminate much of this film, what it's doing, and French cinema broadly. - Yes. This is one of my very favorite films of the '90s. You know, when I think about the great films of 1995, I often think about, you know, before sunrise and casino and heat. But I also have a very, very huge soft spot for closed chibros, la ceremony. This is a great example of late style filmmaking, because this was his 49th feature. - Yes, it was, 49. - But he managed to make one of the greatest films of his career as a very, very old man. - Well, we're gonna talk about that a little bit today. I think it's a startling, staggering work and lots to discuss in it. As Jesse mentioned today, we are gonna go long and try to unpack all the different folds and textures of collage abolts, la ceremony. - Sophie. [speaking French] - [speaking French] - [speaking French] - [speaking French] I'm not sure what I'm saying. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. No. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm sure. I'm sure I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure that I'm sure that I'm sure that I'm sure that I'm sure that I'm sure. I guess we should say as a proviso, you shouldn't find out about the pleasures of this movie from us necessarily. This is a movie that you should watch the gobsmacked by and then listen to us discuss. It's on the Criterion channel. It is indeed. There's a fantastic Criterion edition of this as well out on disc. You can buy it at half price right now from your local barns and nobles. So you have no excuse not to see this film before you listen to us unpack and spoil all of it. And all the extras that are on the Blu-ray are on the Criterion channel as well. They are indeed. A couple of those are really good. We'll talk a little bit specifically about an interview with the great Bong Jun Ho and some of his feelings on the film because it informs quite a bit of what he has done in some of his most notable works. But, Jesse, before we get too deep into conversations about the French and about French cinema, I have a Canadian question for you. Hit me. Does your house have a garbage disposal in the sink? No. It does not. No. OK. But they do exist in Toronto. We don't have one. What? Yeah. So I told Carly I was going to ask you this question, but I wasn't going to mention. Well, I said I would ask a question, but didn't mention what the question was because I wanted her honest reaction to it. So a friend of the program, Doug Tilly, a host of cinema smorgasbord posted thanks to movies. I grew up thinking that garbage disposals were much more omnipresent than they actually are. I don't think I've ever seen one in person and I'm not actually entirely sure what they are meant to be used for. Yes. This is from someone who lives in Ontario. Is Doug a secret Canadian? Yeah, he is Ontario. Yeah, he's from Peterborough. I did not know that. So I had never even considered this or thought about the fact that maybe people didn't have garbage disposals in their home. Apparently, it's only like 50% of American households, by the way. So it's not nearly as omnipresent here in the States as I would have guessed. Like if you had asked me, I would have said like that number is way closer to like 80 something, you know, like definitely in the positive there. But Wikipedia stat also says that only 3% of total Canadian households have a garbage disposal. So my question to you, Jesse, is what do you do with like small pieces of food waste that are on plates in bowls on dishes? Do you have to like spend more time? Is there like a Canadian tool like a plate scraper that you attach near your garbage disposals or near your your waste baskets that helps you to get everything off of a plate? We have in Canada a little strainer that you put in the in the sink. Oh, yeah, that catches all that stuff. And then we put it in what you guys may not know about a green bin. Do you guys have green bins? We have green bins here in the city of San Francisco, of course. I don't think that's a ubiquitous American thing, though. Composting is definitely not. No, like you go to where I'm from in the Midwest and you got two bins. You got trash, you got recycle. We got three bins. We've got trash recycling and a green bin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, you know, one thing that we do here in Ontario that not all of Canada does, and I don't think anybody in America does, is that we buy milk in bags. What? When I go to the store to get milk, I get three bags of milk that add up to about four liters. And we have these clear plastic bags that we put in a little dispenser and we cut a little hole in the milk bag. It's way cheaper than buying cartons of milk. Interesting. How do you-- is there a resealable kind of like section of the bag? Is there like a-- No, no, you just are. You're just expected to use that cut open milk bag in the span of a day or two. Oh, wow. OK. Have you ever-- Jesse, this is a lot of revelations happening all at once. Carly can't even handle it. No, I'm just like, it sounds so unwieldy. It does. It sounds very messy. It sounds very messy. You sometimes do get the all or nothing moment when you're pouring the milk and then the bag shifts and all the half the contents of the milk bag. No, literally that's what I'm trying to get. More alcohol over your hand. I mean, we struggle with cartons, both cardboard and plastic. So have you ever played a version of slap the bag with milk, Jesse? You know the game where you drink like a bagged wine and have people hit it, try to fuck up your game a little bit. You don't want to play a game like that with milk? No. Yeah, what are you going to cry about it, Jesse? It's more like, what is this room going to smell like in three hours? Oh, it spilled milk. I got it. Yeah. I was like, why are you being mean? Well, and this is interesting, though, because it's like, as the saying is, the idiom goes, there's no crying over spilled milk or what have you. But it seems like a much more prevalent issue with our neighbors to the north than it is here in the States. Yeah, we're more likely to cry over the milk bag that we spill. I just love the term milk bag. Yeah. Yeah, it sort of sounds like an insult. It does. I think I'm just going to roll around in my head for a while. Hey, it's very provincial. I like it. It feels very European. It feels very, you know. But not all parts of Canada have milk bags. Ontario loves it. But like, if we go to Alberta or BC, they're like, what are you talking about? It's like a thing that only Donions have to deal with. Interesting. Very interesting. So many compelling revelations happening. This is just totally tickling, Carly. She's delighted by all of this. I just, I don't care about the garbage and souls. I just love that it prompted. A milk bag conversation. Of course. This is important information for our United States audience. And now our Canadian audience is feeling, you know, dejected, incensed. No, I think it's a superior form of consumption. I want to go on record of saying that. Very good. No hostile listeners in Canada are neighbours to the north. Please know that we value you. We respect your culture and your ways of life. And the vessels from which you receive your milk. America is like, wote, wote country. Worst of all time. Worst of all time country like, we don't, we can't throw stones. No, we can. No, it's right. Wote country. Hey, speaking of sloppy milk bags, Claude Shabroul, French new wave director, is that a good segue? Very good. Very good. No, I'm sure that in his time he was, you know, quite good looking and estimable. He bagged a wife like once every 10 years. So surely he's doing something right, although the French, you know, they all are kind of ghoulish and sloppish. All right. I'm going to get a soundtrack here. Jesse, can you tell us about your relationship with this movie when you first saw it and how you feel about it? Thank you. I sure can. Well, I've always loved Claude Shabroul. I haven't loved all of the French new wave filmmakers, but Shabroul is an interesting case because, you know, he was one of the most mainstream-minded of the Nouvelle vogue filmmakers. Like he started off just like Godard and Trufo did as a film critic and a contributor to Caié de Cinema. He was part of film clubs when he was a young man and, you know, eventually he also decided along with the other great directors that I can do this too and I'm going to start making movies. But Shabroul was a particular fan of genre filmmaking. He was particularly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock as well as Henri George Cluso, who made Lady Abalique and The Wages of Fear, but they were huge Hitchcock fans. In fact, Hitchcock tried to option the book that was made into Lady Abalique, but Cluso grabbed it first. So there was a movie that Cluso was trying to make for a long time called "Laufaire," which was an abandoned project in the '60s. There was a documentary a few years ago that used some of the footage that Cluso did shoot for it, but the project died very early during production and never resumed. It was going to be a very, very strange. The way that like how Hitchcock, when he made frenzy, started going kind of cuckoo, making something wild that you wouldn't expect from an elder statesman. This was what Cluso was trying to do too, but it failed and Cluso sort of put it away. He died in the mid-70s. He died around the time that Sorcerer was made, in fact. Freed can famously ask for Cluso's permission to remake The Wages of Fear. But anyway, so Shabroul, the movie that he made before "Laufaire" is he made a version of "Laufaire," when she credited Henri George Cluso with the screenplay for it. And I love that movie. Fantastic film. So I was already on board with late-style Shabroul to give the little background on Shabroul around the time that he was starting out in the mid-50s. He was briefly employed as a publicity man in the French offices of 20th Century Fox, but he was told that he was, quote, "the worst press officer they had ever seen." And he was replaced by Jean-Luc Goddard, who they said was even worse. Sounds about right. These guys are very hostile too, I think mainstream sensibilities. Like they are, you know, it's just very funny to think of that, but it's- They dream them working for Fox, like, yeah, they, you know, have not self-sabotaging tendencies, but ones that are antagonistic, right? I mean, and Goddard leans even more into that, like, in his later period. And working in PR of all departments. No, they're bad PR people, for sure. Yeah. So, but anyway, so Shabroul started off with more formally experimental movies. Le Bo-surge was basically the first film in the New Velvet, and I've seen many of the first movies that he made, like Les Coussaint and Les Bonfants. And Shabroul was also a guy who worked on his friends' movies, either as the Money Man or as a technical advisor, along with Goddard. He assisted Goddard along with Trufo on Breathless, for instance. But in the mid '60s, Shabroul lost some credibility with his contemporaries, because while guys like Goddard were making Vivrosavi and AlphaVille, Shabroul was making these spy spoofs. The series called La Tigre, which was a transparent attempt to make a French Bonne series. Yeah. And I was-- Still a staple of French cinema to this day, right, those OSS films that, yeah. I've seen the first one, Shabroul directed called La Tigre M.A. Le Cher Fréche, which means the tiger loves fresh meat. It's a pretty fun and zippy movie, but not very credible in terms of like being a great artist. But in the late '60s, Shabroul got back on the beam and started making these excellent psychological thrillers, including Le Bich, The Bitches, with his wife, Stefan Odran, who he met and married, and they divorced, but he continued to use her as an actress. He directed Le Pham Infidel, which was remade in the early 2000s in the states by Adrian Line as Unfaithful, with Richard Gere and Diane Lane, and another good one called Le Bichre, The Butcher, and another really good one called La Reptur, which was another psychological thriller. But then there's this interesting Canadian connection. We have a couple of Canadian connections here. Shabroul also made a movie during our notorious tax shelter era that I got very excited to remember existed. A 1978 thriller called Blood Relatives, which was filmed in Montreal based on an Ed McBane novel. The film adaptation got the seal of approval from Akira Kurosawa, who of course made high and low off of McBane novel. It stars Donald Sutherland, R.I.P. and Donald Pleasance. But yeah, Shabroul was a guy who would do anything. But then in the very late '80s, Shabroul started to get back into making sort of like super high quality movies. He worked with Isabel Uper a lot. They made seven films together. They were kind of the Tony Scott Denzel Washington of French cinema. A smart way to put it. Yes. You're talking Carly's language now. Absolutely. I love it. They made a movie called The Story of Women, which was about a woman who was an abortionist in France, I think during the Vichy era. And I think that movie won lots of awards. He did another film earlier called Violette Nozier with Uper just around 1978, '79. But they made seven movies together. And La Sermonie is probably the best thing that they did together. So anyway, Shabroul was sort of back on a roll in the early '90s. Longfair is excellent. And Aaron, you've seen it. I have seen Longfair, AKA, Tornel, AKA, Hell. It has so many different names. It was hard to find initially, actually, because I'm like, well, which one of these is it? You know, peep behind the corner. Which one of these is the torrent going to be named after, you know, like of all these like six different names that it goes by. But I think that movie is fantastic. It's got Immanuel Bert off of her success in Rivette pictures, like Le Belle Noisos. And before she does Mission Impossible two years later. And yeah, I mean, that one's a lot of fun. What I love about Longfair is, as a friend of mine put it when we walked out of the movie, who the person is in the very, very first frame of that movie and who the person is in the very last frame of the movie is an incredible arc. Yes. It's a movie that charters a mental breakdown. Correct. And psychotic jealousy. Psychotic is the best word for it for sure. I loved, I was reading an interview with Chabroll for La Ceremony where they were referencing Longfair. And the author says that it is about the breakdown of a husband just panged with insane psychotic jealousy about his wife, Immanuel Bertte, for no reason other than she is Immanuel Bertte. This is a typical French problem. Yes, it is a typical French problem. It is. That feels great. Having a wife so beautiful that you go crazy. Right. What's incredible at the very end of the movie, most movies end with the word fan, meaning the end. But Longfair ends with sau fan, meaning without end. I love that. He likes doing those little credit tricks, doesn't he? Yes. Well, he does an all-timer in La Ceremony, which we'll get to shortly. Now, to begin our discussion about La Ceremony, I saw this movie at the Toronto Film Festival. And when Carly and I were talking about this show, I asked her to keep a running jaw drop count when she watched this movie. Because when I saw this film, my jaw dropped maybe about six or seven times during the film. I went in blind. I just knew that it was based on a Ruth Rendell novel and that it was the new Claude Shabroul. But I didn't know anything else. So this movie was like being hit by a freight train in terms of the things that happened in this movie. What was your jaw drop count, Carly? Thirteen. Thirteen was fine. And I had some like halfsies in there, too, that I didn't put down as a full jaw drop. Now I have a question. Some head shakes. Yeah. I saw the head shakes, for sure. Well, so my question is because I wasn't present for your entire watch of the film. We watched it separately, as we sometimes do. How many of the jaw drops happened before the last fifteen minutes of the film and how many of them are contained in those last fifteen minutes? I would say probably like eight of them happen in the back half of the film. Okay. Yeah. And four or five have been in the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I'm curious to know, Jesse, thank you for sharing your experience with the film. Carly, I want to know from you, too, because I think that you were the one who maybe had the least foreknowledge of Shabrol and of La Ceremony coming into it, overall impressions, like, what did it make you feel? Where did you start with it? Where did you end with it? I will just out myself as a person who is like not well-versed in French New Wave and its histories. I know like what I need to know to have, you know, a conversation, I guess. But like, I've not spent a ton of time with a lot of Shabrol and don't know about a lot of his work and didn't know anything about this film other than like bits and pieces of ideas based on like the DM that we're all in and you guys talking about it. So I really appreciated going in blind and like allowing this movie to surprise me. And one thing that I think is impressive about it that is specific to me and how I engage with films oftentimes is it left me kind of like in this state of stupefication where like I wasn't constantly trying to figure out what was going to happen next, which is normally what I do, like I'm very like, well what's happening and I'm asking questions and I'm like, well, is this going to happen or I'm like planning and like, you know, trying to like. Specifically, you have an allergy to when a movie goes on for too long without realigning and bringing you back into the fold to help you kind of along the way. And this film is so expertly crafted in ringing a certain, a certain posture from its audience that I couldn't help but just be with the movie. And that's an impressive feat for me and the way that I watch films. In terms of like how it left me feeling, this is a conversation for us to have. I don't want to say like I don't like French new wave and it's and it's sort of tendrils and tentacles that, you know, lurch forward into into the 80s and 90s. But their films that I have more of like a cerebral engagement with and less of an emotional one and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's often perhaps what the creators are after. But sometimes that means that I am experiencing the, experiencing the films at a little bit of a remove, which can either be additive depending on what the movie is or can be sort of like detrimental to my experience. I, this is not my favorite movie of 1995 and I do think it's a beautiful film. What I really like about it is that I, it felt oftentimes like a movie that I shouldn't have enjoyed that I was still like thoroughly riveted by and also just like left me talking about the art form, which like, you know, that's, that's what these guys do. And like, and like I couldn't help but afterward like have a conversation with Aaron and I was like, how do we talk about genre and like what other things and like, I was like, oh, he's doing the thing. He's doing the thing that he's been doing his entire career and here I am and it worked on me. The most remarkable thing about this film, I think is that I hated Isabelle Uber and I adore her and I was just like, I hope you die. I hope you die immediately such a complicated figure. And I think, you know, to your point, Carly, like one of the things that I kind of relished and like reveled in when I was watching the film is just how repulsive I found who pair and also eventually Sandrine Bonaire as Sophie. And still how like kind of mesmerized I was by them. This is a film that does something really distinctive with these two leads in that objectively these are very beautiful women. They are very striking. They have, as the kids would say, incredible face cards, right? Hooper and Bonaire are just like so distinctive and so immediately recognizable and they draw you in. And yet I found myself having trouble even looking at them in certain points where I just needed to kind of like re center myself and steal myself against what they were doing and how they were behaving because it started to really go off the rails really fast once you get them in the same place. Well, you know, guys, how sometimes a grown woman wearing braided pigtails is hot. And then you know, how sometimes a grown woman wearing braided pigtails is like, oh, you're a fucking psycho same thing with micro bangs like this is a situation where I was like and they did both. Let's get the fuck out of here. Yeah, this is dangerous territory we're waiting in by the time they got to that kind of like mechanical almost robotic like embrace while they're watching the television. Carly was like, Nope, Nope. Let's see, how does this film make you feel like what are the what are the kind of waves of emotion you said that on this most recent watch to us on off mic before we started that you were still like a light and heart racing. Where does it begin and what are kind of the peaks and valleys of the film for you? Well, you know, good question. For me, this movie is just a slow acceleration of dread watching two manic people find each other and become even more manic once they get together. So I want to talk a little bit about a quote from Shabrol about this film. He was interviewed in the New York Times around the time less ceremony came out. He wrote this movie with a psychologist whose name was Caroline Eliachif who was the wife of Martin Kamitz or Marin Kamitz, the producer of this film, the MK2 guy. She had experienced teaching children how to read and you know, the first thing that we should I guess mention about this movie is that our main character Sophie in a very shocking development very early on in the movie, we discover that she's illiterate which the movie goes back and forth between describing her as illiterate or as dyslexic. She gets a job working as a housemaid for a very wealthy family in the countryside in the Brittany region of Northern France. We discover at one point that one of the reasons why this Sophie, the Sandrine Bonaire character is so quiet and reserved is that she's hiding a very, very deep shame. The shame is that she can't read and there's a moment in the movie where a note is left for her in terms of her housekeeping duties and this is a crisis for her. For most people it's just a piece of paper with some writing on it. For her it's a sudden shocking moment where they're going to discover that I can't read and she races over to this book that is a book that's designed to help people who can't read to show pictographs of what a letter looks like and what the sound of a voice looks like. There's this despairing moment where she's looking at the letter P on this little note and she's trying to make the P sound based on the book and her eyes are bulging out. This is something that Shabroul brought to the set of the movie and they used it in the film was this book and Bonaire was inspired by Shabroul acting out what somebody does when they're trying to make the letter P sound, his eyes were bugging out and stuff and that's a very disturbing moment in the movie where she's trying to formulate the sound of the letter because she's trying to figure out what this note says. This is a giant obstacle for her and her entire facade could be disrupted. Later a few minutes later another character finds this little piece of paper on the floor and just reads what it says to Sophie and the crisis is averted. Now she can just carry on with the duty that's been asked of her and nobody needs to know that she can't read. But the audience knows a big thing that the family in this movie doesn't know and won't find out for like three quarters of the film. But this is a very interesting quote from Shabroul. He said illiterate adults develop amazing skills in order to hide their problem. In Sophie's case she could recognize the letter P and the letter E but she could not join them to say P like P on their own each is a victim of no importance but when you bring them together they become a dangerous weapon. Zhang is the vowel and Sophie the consonant. Psychologists know this phenomenon well each individual is harmless but together they create an explosive chemical reaction and he compared the two of these and he compared these two characters to Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise that they together they become dangerous. Individually they are capable of some danger as we find out in the film but together they're capable of absolute destruction and anarchy. I love that quote Jesse because it is related to something I was feeling and thinking about watching this movie which is like that these women are kind of atomic like I was thinking about like particles getting like heated up like coming together and like the way that they interact with one another and then there's like an explosion and when you describe the film as a slow acceleration you know into this climax at the end of the movie I think that's what is so remarkable about the experience of watching this film is like on the one hand I'm like oh my jaw drop like 13 times but like the it's not a freight train like it's like a pressure cooker you know like it has these moments that are revelations and that are shocking but the tone of the film remains sort of like oppressively I don't know like repressed right like everyone in the movies is kind of suffocated in some way except for Jean who is about who bears character she is kind of like always like agitated and like moving and like her lip is quivering and she's like muttering to herself and she's like throwing things and she's this she's the thing that instigates the chemical reaction and it's clear she does this everywhere she goes including where she works at the post office which like God knows what kind of habit she is wreaking there working you know at this nexus point for this town where like she deals with everyone's mail but I do I do love that quote because the idea that they together make something of an instrument you know comes to bear at the end of the film I like the Bonnie and Clyde and the film and Louise comparisons one other one that comes to mind for me is Jesse have you seen Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures I was it's in my notes for me to mention yes absolutely that is one for me that I think also feels like this relationship that's at the center of the film with John and Sophie specifically because there is you know maybe there is this in thumb and Louise as well but kind of a a sapphic almost like sexual component to it where these two seem for a little while to entwine not just as friends but almost kind of like quasi lovers you know when they start to kind of embrace there's a lot of kissing they become much more sort of physically entwined over the course of the film and in the same way there's almost like kind of a casual evocation of sort of like the sexual deviance component of stories like this not unlike what Hitchcock kind of did with the rope as well you know that there's these two people who are murderous when they get in the same room together who you know bear sort of these expressions that are counter to heteronormativity as well well to give you guys a further background on this movie it's based on an English novel by the crime writer Ruth Rendell that's called a judgment in stone this novel is in turn loosely based on a true crime in France that captured the imagination of the French public in the thirties it was the case of these two maids named Christine and Leah Pepin they were sisters and Christine had worked for this family at their this wealthy family in their home and she convinced the family to hire her sister Leah and over time hostility is grew between the family and the sisters the the maid the madam of the house was said to be mentally ill and was taking a lot of things out on the sisters the sisters eventually murdered the matriarch and her daughter when the husband and was out of town but the murders were incredibly hideous they found gouged out eyes scattered in the mansion the and when the police finally arrived in the house they found the two sisters locked in a bedroom naked sort of basically hiding waiting to get caught but the the matriarch and her daughter had been beaten with hammers to the point of unrecognizability the sisters compete the sisters confessed to the murders but they each said that they acted in self-defense and then and and insisted that the other sister wasn't involved the sisters were separated in prison this only made things worse because they had this weird codependent relationship and a shared mental illness and the sisters were declared to have suffered from a malady that is known to the French as shared paranoid disorder where one person's delusional beliefs are transmitted to the other when there are under close proximity we may know this better as what they call in france the folly adieu which we'll be hearing more about later this year when joker 2 is released. Correct. And I just wanted to also mention I had said earlier that there was some Canadian content in this episode at the beginning of the movie in the opening credits we see that this film is based on a judgment in stone but it also indicates a thanks to a certain mr. Usama Rowi Rowi is a Canadian cinematographer he only directed one feature film it was a version of this story in 1986 called the housekeeper with his then wife Rita Tushin him I remember this movie because of its classic tagline she cooks she cleans she kills right it's a fantastic tag I love it they could have reused it for this one well chibrol apparently took some inspiration from Rowi's version of the film which is which I watched for the podcast it's on youtube interestingly enough chibrol kind of fused the original source material novel with some of the ideas that were in this uh tawdry Canadian movie maybe chibrol's connections to Canadian cinema are stronger than I thought making blood relatives and then also being inspired by some forgotten Canadian adaptation of this story interestingly Rendell didn't like the Canadian movie but she really likes the chibrol version even though it's not a totally faithful adaptation but I wanted to mention it because there are some differences between the Canadian movie and chibrol's adaptation that are very interesting first of all the capacity that the housekeeper has for murder is shown right at the beginning in the Canadian version in the first five minutes she kills her father because he's giving her her hard time about her illiteracy which turns out to be a big screw up because now that her father is dead she has to go and find a new place to live so she gets a job as a housekeeper to a wealthy family in Canada for fakes her references and uh and she also goes crazy very early on the family I guess because they're Canadian there's a lot more uh tolerant of this crazy woman they have in their house than the French would be because she seems like she's capable of murder in the immediately in the Canadian version but interesting but one weird aspect of it and I don't know because I haven't read the novel what this is from in la ceremony the family the lelevs they are sort of a mixed marriage in the sense that they're that the husband and the wife have two children but the children are from their previous marriages so so um the girl in in this movies the daughter of the father and the boy in this movie is the son of the mother in the housekeeper movie though there's an incestuous relationship between the stepchildren that the housekeeper uses to blackmail the daughter oh interesting in the shabrol version the blackmail that Sophie eventually uh tries to pull is based on the fact that the daughter is pregnant and hasn't told the father who will not like to hear this news so when the when the daughter discovers the dyslexia of Sophie Sophie threatens to expose her pregnancy if she mentions anything but you would think a French movie would be more into doing the incestuous subplot that's you know what i mean it's like that's the kind of uh twist that you would expect from a French the other it did have a couple of moments though between the dad and the daughter and the mom and the son where I was like it it didn't read as necessarily incestuous but I was like they're being like intimate and physical with each other in a way that you could just write off as being like very European yeah or is like a little bit too close you know for like the ages that they were yeah I have my read on that and I noticed this too by the way like they're they're very close all of them like there's the the line where Jill the son tells um Jacqueline Bassett's character the the mother Catherine like after she gives him a cigarette and says like you can only smoke in front of me he says something where he's like anything to make you happy you know like yeah and my supposition is that you know this is not spoken by anybody or like you know kind of in the text at all but that both of them have spouses that are absent right uh Jacqueline Bassett and Jean-Pierre Cassell uh father of the great Vincent Cassell uh they have spouses who are now no longer in the picture and so have started to connect spousal relational dynamics to the children and in turn the children are fine with this to a certain extent because part of the text also implies and shows us reveals to us that because they're wealthy because the they have access to capital and are comfortable that these families stay linked and connected specifically because of the material benefits of it even when they're at odds with one another so that I mean that's what I was picking up on and interesting but it is fascinating to hear that there's a different version of this where there is a straight up incest between the siblings in it yeah now the other thing that is a deviation between the Canadian version of the story and the French version is that in the Canadian version the friend who works at the post office is a former prostitute turned religious zealot um in la ceramoni is about who pairs relationship with the church is basically exploitation like she uh volunteers yeah at the local church to like get her mitts on some free clothes like she's like picking stuff for herself uh and and and being very very rude about uh how most of the clothes are crap and there's also that scene where where they're doing a um clothing drive where they go to this person's house and start yelling at them for only giving them garbage and throwing the clothes everywhere in the um Canadian version though uh the woman is actually deeply devout that's part of the reason why she's so crazy is uh her religious zealotry and in the Canadian version the violence at the end of the movie is um depicted more with the crazy religious woman using the housekeeper as her instrument of wrath she basically puts the housekeeper up to murdering everybody for her uh in in the french version though they're a team like they're working together they are feeding each other's delusions um and um you know I mean we'll we'll talk about this more but like um the isabel who pair character interestingly all of the actors the main actors in this movie were all nominated for scissor awards that year because the ceremony was nominated for like eight or nine scissors the winner though was isabel who pair she won best actress uh i think though that she's a supporting actor in this movie even though they're a team if i had to tell you who i think the lead actor in this movie is it's sangerine baneur so i i think that she got robbed but the isabel who pair performance is a flashier one like she's so nuts uh i have bad news for you carly isabel who pair at the time said that the character that she plays in less ceremony is the one closest to her real personality except except for the almost idle maniac version of it uh she says that this part is a lot like how she really is yeah there's it seemed very comfortable on her i will see she wears it well there's a there's a video like a viral video that goes around every so often on twitter and i don't know what it's from but like there's like a uh very kind of constructed interview with who pair where she's like sitting in like a black room at a desk and there's like a stuffed animal on the table and she's just taking a giant uh knife to it like a butcher's knife and just like cutting it into pieces and i'm like this is a perfect evocation of how i feel your like psyche is just like you know just like a a stunningly beautiful woman a little cold uh you know steely just like hacking away at like a stuffed bunny rabbit of sorts yeah yeah didn't you know but i i think that you're right jesse i mean this is bonaire's film overall she is the lead she is the the protagonist of the movie uh and it's a much more understated performance and in fact i think that's what is so rewarding about it she speaks uh with a lot of brevity maybe that's an understatement a lot of times they're just sort of like one word or one sentence answers she gives and it starts right away it's interesting that you mentioned that the canadian version of this film begins with the murder of the father and then faking references to get the job i had an inkling at the beginning of lacerimony that the paper with the phone number with the references and and sort of her resume of sorts was also fraudulent for whatever reason like i got the sense that she was there and that changes the dynamic of that scene a lot obviously there is a employer-employee relationship happening here in an interview process going on in this first scene at a cafe but bonaire starts to shift the power dynamic back to her in subtle ways that you think may be uh incidental but also could very well be calculated that she's just playing very close to the chest she's very direct with uh how she answers the questions about her knowledge and what she can do you know the the wife uh jacklin bissette's character is trying to sort of equivocate and be like well i'll do the cooking of course you just handle the other work and she's like well i can cook i know how to cook um and sort of kind of pulling you know these domestic duties onto herself and and sort of level setting and and raising her herself in terms of the power uh in the conversation likewise she hands over the letter with the references and says you can call this number and check with them and they'll they'll tell you what a good job i did and jacklin bissette says oh that's not necessary and sort of you know kind of shuns the way it's like you know it's it's in domestic labor you're you're fine it seems like you know what you're doing uh that play is very interestingly thinking about that letter being uh a counterfeit and that bonaire was banking maybe on somebody never calling that phone number and knowing that somebody like bissette wouldn't even bother to check references for this kind of labor well you know one thing that i love about less ceremony is it's an incredibly rewarding rewatch there are all these things that just play out without you thinking there's anything to them the first time you watch the movie the second time you watch the movie you start realizing that a lot of the stuff that we're seeing we're going to see twice in this film at the beginning of less ceremony um she gets the tour of the house and she gets shown all of the rooms and i realized when i saw it again at the end of the movie that uh the the execution of this family that gets carried out in the climax of the movie is another tour of the house we see all the same places again except this time we're seeing them as sort of an abattoir as opposed to a an environment like we are seeing the clean version of it at the beginning of the movie and then we see the horrible version of it again at the end of the film and then less ceremony uh keeps the idea of of bonaire having a dark past away from the viewer uh and only reveals it at the moment where these two crazy people meet each other and kind of fall in love you know and become besties um they bond over the fact that they both have gigantic question marks in their past the um sofis father died in a fire and uh sofis wasn't there but she was a suspect and she was eventually let go and uh they were just not able to prove anything so it didn't affect her life too much she was uh notorious in the newspapers for a while and this is something that jeon discovers because she is first and foremost a snoop she likes to find out what she can about everybody she's a crazy person who also has cited that everybody is conspired against her like she she is carrying around a lifetime of resentments at one point she even insinuates that um the jacklin beset character was a fashion model who beat her for an opportunity when they were younger yes as a blonde important she changed her hair but so the so her character works at the post office and we discover that she eventually moved to the town from another town and in that other town years ago she was accused of killing her four-year-old daughter and she was also not convicted of it they couldn't establish proof and they had to let her go she found opportunities in a new town because everyone hated her in the old town but she also had a dark past and there's an incredible sequence where the two women who have become friends uh partly because the jeon character wants to know as much as she can about the lelev family who she hates and has personalized her hatred for these people like she really really hates uh she really really hates these people and she says at one point when they're driving that i'd be happy if i had one tenth of the money that they have like she's just she's decided that her life would be a lot better if if it wasn't for these people and she's got an opportunity now with sofi to find out even more about them uh and the father uh suspects and i think he's right that uh that jeon is reading his mail at the post office there's a very funny scene where he's he's just so apoplectic at home uh because he's convinced that this package that arrived from the post office has been steamed open and ripped open and he wants to confront her about it and there's a great scene where he just shows up at the post office and they're both arguing with each other and you can just tell in this one and a half minute long scene that they both hate each other's guts so much i love the way that they introduce the mail reading as almost like an aside it's it's you know not quite a blink and you miss it but there's no uh as far as i can remember kassel doesn't mention that he suspects the uh postal clerk of the suspects who parrot of being the person opening the mail he's just complaining that the package seems seemed and and badly re-tied and that the mail looks like it's being opened uh and it's your first indication because we already know and have been introduced to who parrot that she is you know the post mistress like oh this person is just a bit manic they're they're just doing stuff i like what you said josie about this film being like really rewarding on rewatches because even as we're talking about it now i'm like reflecting on moments in my first watch and thinking like oh that makes that thing that much more interesting like i'm thinking about when they pick up jeon and from the train station when um the matriarch of this rich family is driving sofi to their house to start her employment jeon asks asks if she can get a ride and um be dropped off at the post office and they give her a ride and sofi and the matriarch are up in the front of the car and jeon is sitting in the back seat in between them and she's like looking at she's eyeing sofi the entire time and i'm like i was watching it and i was like what's going on here and i'm retroactively realizing that is jeon realizing this is a person that she can use as a way to get into the family like her recognition of like oh this is help and this is a woman who i can befriend and who can give me access to this family and this space that i want to have access to and also a little game recognized game that was what i was thinking is like like yeah it's like hey you're kind of like me you're you're not as demonstrably cuckoo as i am but you're not you're keeping things so close to the chest that i think there's something that you're hiding and uh she's very very interested in becoming friends with her there's a great scene where the family goes away for a few days and um and jeon shows up at the house to drop a letter off uh she's like oh i was just in the neighborhood i thought i'd come in but she does something crazy she climbs in through the front window instead of coming in through the front door it's like and sofi's sort of okay with this the the big difference between these two women is that um that jeon is manic like she acts like a bratty teenager she's in her 40s i guess but she's glumping around as she walks and she dresses younger than she is and she's got pigtails and a beret she shows open contempt for most people she only wants to know details of people's lives as gossip fodder and as ways to feed the grievances that she already has for other people you know who she reminded me a lot of was her american contemporary in the 90s jennifer jason lee yes yep i see that i totally see that yeah if you've ever seen georgia by umulu grow bard uh she's like that she's just like danger on two legs uh she's just there's something very dangerous and unsettled and unstable about her whereas bonair is playing sofi as an enigma you she never lets anyone in on anything there's a scene where basically um where um jon basically explains while she's driving at night the whole story of what happened to her kid which does sound like uh she did she did play a role in her kid's death she just was never much caught for it but jon is telling her this story as an opportunity for her sofi to tell her what's going on and sofi says no like we don't find out anything about it the only thing that we find out is that earlier scene where they bond over the fact that both of these women seem to have gotten away with it because nobody could prove it and they have this uh tickle fight and they're so amused and and they're so thrilled that they both seemingly have gotten away with murder uh in the past like they have something uh they have something in common but they come at it from two different ways like sofi actually starts to become a more of a ebullient ebullient personality uh once she's got permission to do so from from jon like she's she smiles a lot more from when they're together and you know but she's still not gonna tell her anything um if if sofi ever has a panic about anything she does it by herself um the i i think like the less that you explain the less you have to further explain is her theory like yeah she's just quiet she just does what she's told through most of the movie at some point though sofi decides that she doesn't have to conduct herself this way anymore with the family and she starts openly rebelling like going away to go hang out with jon when the family are having a sort of a birthday party for the daughter and she basically prepares all the food for them and then splits uh she's basically on super bad behavior but i do want to talk about that one moment where malinda's birthday party is happening where she introduces her boyfriend to her parents and her the boyfriend brings her a gift of a new boombox foreshadowing as it turns out one of the guests who's a guy who looks a little like glo'd shabrol actually is making conversation it's not him but he might have been cast because he kind of looks like shabrol so one guy is says to malinda at the party a philosopher once said let no one say that 20 is the best age in life and the shabrol guy says 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 but when he says that they cut to the family and uh a woman at the party says my god who said that and the father george says nich you know he knows because he's a well-read man uh you know that the other irony in this movie is that you know this is a very very literate family a very well-to-do family and the woman that they have working for them is illiterate and actually hates books won't mean the books um that's one of the few complaints they have about her as a housekeeper she she's a great cook she keeps the place really tidy she'll won't touch the books though she won't dust them she just leaves them alone right as if she's just like incensed by their very presence there right just like ashamed of even having to look at them uh she much prefers the television which is an interesting point of reference just sort of like the recurring motif of audiovisual elements in the film uh when we're first introduced to the leleves i think is how you said i don't know we'll we'll butcher it a couple more times uh but george and geel uh patriarch and stepson are on the couch and geel is just flipping through channel after channel of like their new like satellite tv without picking anything and just mesmerized by the kind of cacophony of visuals you know not even watching anything just scanning uh and it's later mentioned that sofi bonair's character doesn't really before she meets jon go out much do much of anything she's never reading she's never interested in you know any sort of quote-unquote like culture she just spends all of her time in her room watching the television which is a hand me down it's the old television that they have since replaced in the living room area uh and i find this connection interesting i don't know if there's anything deeper about it perhaps there is with regards to television as a medium but also television as uh sort of this i don't know an opiate for the mass is kind of thing that draws from the the working class and the bourgeoisie alike what do you all make of it well i have thoughts on this um i love the use of of crap television in this film like i when i saw this movie whenever they cut to the stuff that sofi is watching it's the worst direct you've ever seen like it's like uh variety shows with like you know maudlin singers and like uh puppets wrapping and stuff like all this like lowbrow tv and um that's a very deft little uh point that shabrol is making is that you know this woman is uh once again illiterate and dyslexic and you know she has access to the tv but she doesn't know the button to push to get the tv to run because she can't read and she doesn't know what channel is what but when the tv is on it's it's got her full attention because you know this is some of the only uh culture she has access to as somebody who can't read um and there are key moments in the film where things are getting very stressful where she turns on the tv and turns to the tv to drown out the pressure that she's under there's that terrifying scene where the the dad phones home and says i left this very important file on my desk uh got a guy coming over in the car to come pick it up can you go get it and she can't but this is yet another thing where uh there's nobody who can help her in this situation that none of the kids are at home she can't play dumb um instead of just um doing what i would have done which was wait for the guy to come to the house and said can you help me find this thing instead she just doesn't answer the door she just turns the tv on full blast and just weights it out it's just so uh this is the thing about this movie making my heart race is just there all these things that happen in the course of the storytelling that are just like jesus christ like like how is she gonna get out of this one and and where is this going it can't be going anywhere good and when you've seen the movie already you're like this is all leading up to the death um the title of the movie la ceremony is refers to a french turn of phrase which are the events that lead up to the execution of a criminal via the guillotine mm-hmm so these are this movie is about these two people marching towards their doom i mean and this family that have taken in the the person that is going to make sure that they die you know um when it comes and back to this uh uh point about the use of television in this movie sophie uses it as a panacea and as an escape and as a thing to turn off her brain the lelyev family though they use television to access high culture right there's only one quick moment where they're using the tv the way that like sophie would be really excited to see the channels that they're flipping past because they're flipping past the game shows and the variety shows uh they don't give a shit about that stuff because they're classy people they even get dressed up for an evening in front of the tv to watch uh production of Don Giovanni by Mozart right i was in america this is a family that would be donors to pbs you know like these are people look at television as like look at how refined we are look at my wonderful library we're gonna get together and watch Don Giovanni i love the the boy in that scene because the rest of the family are enraptured with the opera and the boy is just bored out of his mind he's trying to be polite but uh you know in a way he'd probably be happier to watch the garbage that sophie's watching on tv um i love the the way that these two worlds collide towards the end when george the the patriarch discovers sophie's blackmail plot against malinda who does the right thing she uh she tells her dad uh when when when sophie says if you tell the family about my illiteracy i will tell them about your pregnancy so don't say anything you bitch um that was a jaw drop moment for me for the record yeah she says like i'm not the bitch you are uh so scary and she's also got the pigtails at this point the way that uh john has too you know like they're even wearing their hair the same way um yeah but anyway the daughter does the right thing which is to tell both to the family uh you know she's illiterate and i'm pregnant you know just that's the quick way to get out of this situation so george um goes up to sophie's room to fire her there's that really funny line where he says i can't believe it one of these women can't read and the other woman is reading my mail what a pair so he goes up to open the door and walk in and she's watching tv she's got a blank expression on her face and they've got that song cantaloupe by us three is playing on the tv that and he's like and he's like you're fired and i'm not going to write you a reference letter i'm a nice guy so you've got a week to get out of here obviously your services are no longer acquired uh you know but he eventually turns off the tv to get her attention but she's such a blank slate uh you know that uh like he just shuts off the tv uh at the end of the movie the two ladies shut off the tv too after they've killed the whole family mm-hmm something i like about the television is the way that it helps illuminate one of the most fascinating aspects of the film which is the way in which both of these women Sophie and Jean are children but very different kinds of children very different aspects of how a child can exist in the world Jean as you said Jesse is like this snotty-nosed teenager who is chewing gum and sticking it on you know bookshelves and like twirling her hair and like snarling and throwing clothes about she's incredibly penetrative um when we talk about her walking through coming through the window and like going barging into people's homes and tearing through their clothes like she is she is penetrative she is like um she's flagrant right um the way that kids can be sometimes they don't they don't abide by social mores they don't abide by the rules that we've laid out as adults because they don't necessarily know them uh and and are still learning them Sophie on the other hand is childlike in the sense that she is observant and she's constantly taking things in because that's all she knows how to do right so she is slightly more infantile in her childishness she doesn't know how to read and write so a lot of how she engages with the world is like a small child that does not know how to read and write they do what they're told they're looking at things they're taking things in they like shiny bright you know pictures and um they're engaging with the world by being a sponge because that's how they survive that's how they're learning and that's how they they make do in situations but one of the first things i noticed about Sophie is her gloves which the camera lingers on for a moment in the very first meeting between Sophie and the mother in in this family Sophie is um also dressed like a child in a lot of this movie she has these knit gloves they're like floral like teacup pattern gloves and i remember like seeing them and being like those are so odd like why is she wearing those and she's has these like floral sweaters and then you know she starts wearing her hair and pigtails like she's there's a lot about her that feels like kind of toddler and i i also think that what's interesting about the childishness of these two women is their sort of impunity and the way that it manifests differently um they are indignant about certain things um and when you see flashes of that come up it's surprising particularly from Sophie and i think that um Sandrine's performance of Sophie is absolutely the best actress performance because of how much is happening all the time with her that she's very good when you don't know what's going on in the film yet of you just not even noticing it and then retroactively realizing like like when she went into town and they were making her go get glasses and she was being an idiot like buying chocolate and you know giving a hundred francs for something and i'm just like god you're so annoying and then i realized after the fact i was like oh like of course she's not going to go buy glasses of course she's going to go buy sunglasses and like not know how much you know this piece of chocolate costs like yeah it's it's remarkable what she's able to pass off as totally benign that then you retroactively understand is like very intentional and calculated on her part well Sandrine Bonaire said that like she came at this character and everything that all the choices that she made in this film all stem from the basic fact that the character that she is playing has an impairment that that defines their life and everything that they go through is to avoid humiliation they are always on the verge of being exposed at all times like there's that fantastic scene that shabrol said is one of the key scenes in the movie where where she's in the kitchen and um Melinda the the young daughter who is trying to sort of play this kind of like um simpatico relationship like she wants to be kind of friends with the help yeah but she's the most like woke of all of them you know because she's like the college student and like recognizes some of the class dynamics at play here you know and this is a point that uh we'll get to in a couple of minutes if we can talk a little bit more about bong junho is that um these are people who are trying to be friendly and nice to the help but the fact is there's a stratification here there's the people that are that that are running the house and then they're the people who work for them and in a way one of the big condescending sins that the daughter does is to try to be friends with the help like imagine being friends with somebody who you could fire as your friend if they don't do something the right way um and and uh there's that other scene where she uh runs across johns whose car is broken down and she helps her fix it and she asks for like a handkerchief to sort of clean her hands and then she throws the dirty handker chief back at john like what am i supposed to do with this dirty handkerchief oh i'll just throw it at this person like it's it's unconscious but it's like it gives you an idea of the high status low status stuff and and one of the grossest things about the condescension of the family is this idea that i can be friends with you so she's trying to be palsy with um with Sophie and saying oh let's play a little game let's uh look at this magazine she doesn't know that Sophie just eavesdropped on a conversation that she had with her boyfriend about how she's pregnant because Sophie's also helping to collect information about the family to sort of feed the crazy friendship that she has with john and uh she's like oh why don't you read the magazine let's take turns and Sophie says oh my glasses are over there and she's like oh i'll grab them for you and she gives them to her and she's uh and then she tries them on casually and realizes that they're not prescriptive glasses and she suddenly says oh i didn't realize that you can't read oh you know but we can help you we can uh we can enroll you in a course i can help you to learn how to read like it's like are you really going to give that kind of uh effort over to this person you know like and and Sophie is just so mad because um she can't even accept uh offers of help because they're probably not true for offers of help Sophie is a humiliated woman like and and this is a huge humiliation when when the family now discovers that she can't read like this is not going to be held a secret for long there's a brilliant um tiny little movement that shabrol does with the camera where he suddenly just goes in a little bit on her as she goes uh like like as uh as Sophie goes uh like she sort of realizes that she's been caught and and the subtle camera movement uh delivers so much more information it's like oh shit you know and and instead of finding a peaceful way out of it Sophie is like a cornered animal and says you know i'll ruin your life if you ruin my life i'll ruin your life you fucking bitch like it's like so so horrible it is that scene in the kitchen is i think my favorite scene in the whole the whole film shabrol says that is one of the most important scenes in the movie yeah well it's the moment where Sophie finally uh resolves to act on a lot of the stuff that she's just been sort of burdened with and quiet about you know throughout the film as we've already mentioned she plays everything really close to the chest she's very quiet she's very sort of reserved in her speaking and so it's hard to really know whether she's like too innocent and childish to really take offense to some of the things that are happening or if she is absolutely taking offense and just okay with it and kind of you know uh quelling some of those resentments and the longer she spends with John the more those things start to kind of boil over to the surface uh but everywhere along the way you know to your point Jesse about the kind of condescension of like paddling around with the help and like you know being like oh we can pay for your reading lessons they do this constantly right like the entire reason she isn't going in a town is because she needs glasses to see because she lied about why she can't drive and the only reason she lied about not being able to drive is because they insist that she borrow the car to drive herself and then oh well you don't know how to drive that's fine we'll get you lessons you know like everything is a sort of like a kind of like tacit almost like casual flaunting of how insignificant these issues and problems are to this family because of their wealth or rather it's that everything is a transaction right like that's what it is it's like every obstacle they encounter is a transaction for them to you know use money in and like that's the exchange but to use money also to show what wonderful people they are right you know and like when you're on the receiving end of somebody else's largesse uh you know and and and at the same time you are uh one big mistake away from just being humiliated uh it you know it's just more of the turning of the screw that this whole movie is about um and it also uh just want to segue here that when I first saw parasite in 2019 I was getting major less ceremony vibes while I was watching it and so I did a fist pump when I read a article where they interviewed Bong Joon Ho about um his inspirations for parasite and he said oh less ceremony I was like oh yeah absolutely absolutely because the the the the really really insightful points that parasite makes about um how cool it is to be pals with the help even though you all the compromises are on the help side like they get to be whoever they want to be uh the help have to it's the largesse of the rich that uh the the poor can can get out uh can benefit from but it is not a two-way street there is no actual respect between the two sides the resentments um are actually all on the other side like the the rich don't resent the poor so much in either of these movies but the condescension is what gives away their true feelings and the poor have to take it yeah I mean in both cases right like you said they're they're not necessarily evil people the the wealthy the the upper class folk but they are largely indifferent and so uh hermetically seal the way and isolated from the problems of the working-class people that uh they don't even consider the problem unless it is in their face and then it becomes a transactional issue right it just becomes an issue to throw money at the problem um I I wanted to percent agree I had not seen this movie less ceremony until after parasite for this purpose of this podcast I think Carly may be the only person left on the planet who hasn't seen parasite she's not in a long but so many moments in that movie thinking back now reflect uh things that are absolutely kind of cribbed from the ceremony I think specifically of the conversation between the husband and the wife the the wealthy husband and wife that is uh eavesdropped upon by the other characters and they hear that the the patriarch uh thinks that the other uh patriarch of the of the working-class family stinks he he has an odor to him he kind of smells like rotting cabbage and there's that very noteworthy and kind of famous moment in the film where the wife is in the back seat of the car being chauffeured around by him and she finally catches wind of it and sort of uh sort of nonchalantly starts to roll down the window so that she can get a draft of air and you just see his face and the resentment start to steadily kind of weigh on him as he understands that there's no respect here no matter how much they laud his performance in his work and also a little pedagogical stuff too the way that both parasite and less ceremony have this kind of like oh I can teach you how to read I can um instruct you on on how to read like you know like the sort of cynicism of the uh of the altruism that's actually uh it's a again a transactional relationship it's the you know the the rich uh having the largesse to be able to solve all problems with money shaburl said when he was uh making this movie he referred to it as the last marxist film he was kidding uh but it kind of is it's but it's a movie that's coming from the aristocracy like shaburl is upper class but I think he has um a recognition of what's the matter with the aristocratic uh levels of society like this movie I don't think that it's um I don't think that um he's not saying eat the rich in this movie the way that parasite kind of is but uh but he is saying that there's a there's a fundamental unfairness of this and that you know this is a significant quote from that interview with the New York Times when the less ceremony was released this is a quote from shaburl I have heard rich industrialists saying that class warfare is over but it's not really up to them it's up to the workers to say it's over and in truth the happier the industrialists are the more worried I am people's frustrations have to go somewhere and if they don't go into dreams they explode when I posted that I was watching this film someone said oh I can't wait to hear if you answer the uh question that always comes up with shaburl which is is this movie fascist and I was like oh I'm sure I'll have a thought on that um and I don't think that this movie is fascist but I don't know that it's like Marxist either I think like the class dynamics in this film reveal a perspective on the part of shaburl that is one that is informed right like he is revealing that he understands um the antagonisms between working class and ruling class and he understands them from the perspective of the working class I think that much is clear in the film um but I also think it's interesting to consider what making class violence manifest itself in the way that it does in this movie like what that might do to the concept of you know violence against the ruling class and I don't think that it's like cynical on his part to delegitimize it in the way that I think that he does I think he's more interested in other things about the movie like the relationship between these two women and um and some of the formal qualities that he's playing with as the movie unfolds and that's more that's more of his focus but it is interesting that the you know violence as a form of revolution is something that you know communists we understand as part of of the process of undoing capitalism and its hold um and very necessary for radical change but the violence in this film while it may stem from working class resentment is also you know colored by psychosis and delusions that are you know flamed by the relationship between these two women and oftentimes when Jean is saying things that I agree with intellectually emotionally I'm like you're insane shut the fuck up and so like there's this there's just I don't think that that is like an answer for whether or not this film is the last Marxist film or fascist I don't think that talking about it in those terms is productive or what what the movie is about but I do think it's interesting to consider what happens to the politics of this movie when certain things happen in the film you know with certain characters like I also think like there are moments when the um I have a certain amount of sympathy for the Lil Yev family and you know that's not to say that like in real life like I think them having millions and millions of dollars or franks or whatever is like a good thing and that that like that wealth shouldn't be redistributed but it complicates my feelings about their death and it complicates my feelings about you know violence against the ruling class broadly speaking and this is where Carly and I got into the aforementioned like conversations off Mike about like genre and genre experimentation and Chabroll's place in all of that that it's a movie that I think identifies class resentments that were meant and intended to recognize but I think that it's also trying to be a little uh slyly and kind of nudgingly like indicting you know we're supposed to sympathize with these characters and this particular sentiment while also knowing that they're not necessarily good people and that also sort of uh reveals a dark core to us and at the end there is almost a sort of sick pleasure and delight that we get from watching these two take vengeance on this family even though they've done nothing explicitly wrong because we've been watching for the duration of the film these tiny aggressions take place you know this this uh sort of uh demonstration of their belief that they are higher than these other people even if it's only subconscious and there's a great quote in that Bong Joon Ho interview uh about the ceremony where he's talking about Chabroll and De Palma both as extensions of Hitchcock and I think De Palma does something very similar in his genre exercises in terms of kind of fighting the dark underbelly of humanity and exploiting that while also having it be sort of a revelation of sick fantasies that we can all sort of share in and Bong Joon Ho says that while De Palma is a little bit greasy Chabroll is like a dry brittle pastry yeah and I think that that's very very accurate well let me blow your mind Aaron um in femme fatale Brian De Palma's masterpiece Sandrine Bonaire shows up as herself yes it does indeed in that sequence at the Con premiere at the Confest West uh so I don't I think De Palma uh game recognized game you know he's like uh Chabroll got to put Sandrine Bonaire in my movie somehow yes I'll just get her to play herself um now what I have to say about all this with Marxism and stuff like that you know it's a joke Chabroll is not a Marxist this is a movie about class resentments this is also a psychological thriller about crazy people who inflict uh violence that does not deserve to be handed out like the family didn't do anything to deserve this in the film this is because uh through their sort of um the road to hell being paved with good intentions they let Sophie into their home without really checking her references she met uh fellow traveler another uh crazy person they fed each other's delusions Jean didn't make Sophie do any of this stuff but she kind of encouraged her to hate these these people because of her own hatred of these people which is again coming from a delusion that they now share I don't know if you notice this in in the film but one of the one of the incredible little details that Chabroll puts in this movie is the way that he uses the front gate of the family's home there's a scene where um when Sophie takes off during the Melinda's birthday party and she takes off on them to go hang out with with um Jean whose car is waiting outside the estate and she goes through the gate and she doesn't see uh Jean in front of the car she doesn't she's alone and then she looks back and sees Jean coming out of the woods will the mushrooms that she's collected for them to make a mushroom dinner and then they go through the gate together and Chabroll said that that is not an accident the gate is the the path into madness and the two of them head into it together at the end of the movie when the killing has happened and they part ways Jean drives through the gate by herself her car gets stuck as soon as she gets outside of the gate and then her car is destroyed by an oncoming van that was driven by the priest who fired them for being such idiots at the church another mirroring I remember how I said that this movie has the same scene happening twice there's there's that scene where they're at the church and they're going through all the clothes and they're throwing them all around at the end of the movie when they're in desecrating the family's bedroom and pouring hot chocolate all over the bed which I thought was like another jaw dropping moment like you don't see fine linen being destroyed like that by these crazy people like they're acting like some of the Manson family members in this scene and then they go through their fine clothes and start ripping them up and and treating those clothes just like they do the garbage that they supposedly resent all these people that give the church garbage as donations they're they're rendering these garments into garbage by doing all this stuff like they're not morally pure people they're just motivated by resentment and they're feeding each other's madness at the end of the movie when when Sophie realizes that they're fucked because after the killings happen Jean takes the boombox that they were using to record the opera that the family was all watching together she just innocently grabs it and says mine and it's in the car when her car gets hit by the van the cops find the boombox and they start playing the tape and on the tape is the murdering of the family so Jean's dead Sophie's all alone and I have to say this is one of the greatest things I've ever seen in the movie going to the end credits is when when we start hearing the tape and we start realizing that the cops now have the evidence against Sophie and Jean as the killers and they thought that they got away with it well Sophie thought she got away with it she realizes when she goes outside that Jean's dead and the cops now have the audio of them committing the murders Shabrol shows Sandrine Bonaire's concerned face and then the end credits start rolling and this is one of the most thrilling things I've ever seen in the movie black comedy to me it's just like Shabrol revealing the that there is something vaguely darkly comic about this entire movie we don't need to see anything else we don't need to see Sophie get caught we don't need to see her sent to the guillotine that is symbolically represented by the title of the movie we know that she's been she's she's gonna get caught very quickly and even though she walks off into the night as the credits roll and we hear the murders again on an audio cassette it's Shabrol's dark-hearted way of just sort of ending this whole story like there's nowhere else to go now and I have to say I did laugh when the credits started rolling I thought you know Shabrol you were a fucking mad man I love it it's a perfect ending it's terrific I mean just just perfect and so surprising I had forgotten about it even though like two minutes earlier the daughter says she's recording the thing and then you see Jean Walker like I didn't piece it together and I think you know what's what is stunning about this film is how like marvelously architected it is like it is so he is so intentional in like every moment he stitches together that to still surprise us you know in the closing shot of the movie the way that he does is just remarkable I I want to go back to one thing that you said though about Jean and Sophie and like how they sort of the the way that the climax unfolds Jean is the person who is perhaps pushing things forward and we see this in the moments leading up to the the execution of this family she's like the one that says no let's go into the bedroom she's the one pouring hot chocolate all over the bed which was a jaw drop moment for me I was like scandalized she's the one tearing up these beautiful clothes another jaw dropping moment for me I was just like oh my god that's a silk blouse and yet Sophie is the person who takes the first shot she's also the person who knows how to load and use the guns so in in a beautiful sort of like flip of of just your experience and understanding of these women perhaps or maybe the your experience of these women finally coming into full relief you realize that Sophie is actually perhaps the darker one between the two of them that Jean is you know a fucking psycho and like acting like one constantly right Sophie isn't and yet she is the person who shoots the gun fires a shotgun at the neck of of the father in this film before it's even come you know to anything that might even remotely require that and she's not trigger happy she's not it's not a mistake she that was always going to happen and you sort of realize this as the you know events of of this execution unfold but then you know Jean picks things up herself right away and she shoots a 13 year old boy first before she shoots anyone else before she shoots the mom who she hates the most out of anyone in that family she says to Sophie well her goose is cooked it's like the second that Sophie kills the father Jean realizes she realizes she has permission to just like go do all these horrible things that she wanted to do anyway and she's she's got it out for the mom but she kills the son first and it's like it's this the execution is um is is bizarre because it happens really quickly and it happens very matter of factly but it's also like entirely chaotic while on the surface feeling like strangely orderly I don't know if that makes sense I I had a very strange experience watching the end of the film one of the other important visual signifiers towards the end of this movie is that you get the sense throughout the movie that this is a big house but there are the servants areas and then there are the family areas and there's you know when when the family is having dinner Sophie is in the kitchen picking away at the carcass of the chicken with her fingers and then gets called in to go clean up the room and you sort of see this sort of card or that she has to go through and we hear a lot of off-screen sound throughout the movie and we hear the family talking about Sophie we don't see the family but we hear their voices and and it's almost like Sophie doesn't exist to the family when she's not in the room with them at the end of the film in this climactic moment when the two ladies sneak back into the house where they're no longer welcome the Jean was never welcome in this house that was like a huge problem that that uh Sophie has with the family is they hate her friend they think that maybe this is her girlfriend too and they're trying to be again sort of uh you know uh fair-minded liberals about it like they're like oh you know you can see whoever you want but she can't be in the house I don't mind that the two of you are together I just can't have her in my house that's like even though they're not officially a couple they're the the fully adieu between these two people is being mistaken as a romance by other people and they're trying to be sort of fair about it cool aristocrats about it anyway what I'm saying is that um we see that there are these areas of the house that are for the servants and they're sneaking around while the family's watching the opera and there's that fantastic moment where the family are watching the opera on tv and the camera moves up to show this little sort of balcony area in their in the big living room where the two ladies are staring down at them and they're looking down on these wealthy people this is the only way that these two people can look down on the upper classes is by looking at them from another floor of the house it's a delusional idea that they're above them it's only because of the the levels of the house that they're above them they're not really above them the way that they uh level the playing field is to kill this family who didn't deserve to die anyway um and I think that maybe I don't know what you guys think about this Shabrol I think is saying not so much that um you know there's a problem between classes and class warfare but that um the only ways that that um actual conflict breaks out between upper and lower classes is if somebody's mentally ill that these two women create this crazy revenge plot that is news to the family they find out when they're getting killed that this has been in the works for a while yes but it's not uh it's not the solution to anything like these two women have now ruined their futures of what futures they had they're not going to get away with it they're under this illusion since they got away with these murders in the past that nobody could prove that they're going to get away with this too the two of us together it's like a Voltron of psychotic behavior like you know even the two of us together we can do we can get away with anything we want which gets undone very quickly in the black comedy ending of the movie where literally Shabrol once we all understand that Sophie is doomed and is going to get caught any second now we can start rolling the credits and the movies over there's uh nothing else to see here yeah the kind of like joke of the credits coming up over this for kind of black comedic moment is uh fantastic and and really shocking surprising amusing all at once Jesse have you seen the new rose glass film love lies bleeding no it's on my list i haven't even seen the beast yet i'm so behind no that's okay i i just watched love lies bleeding last night actually on a whim and i won't spoil it for either of you if you want to watch it because i know you haven't yet um but they do something somewhat similar where there is a uh act of blackly comedic violence that is integral to the plot that plays uh with the credits rolling over it at the end and it is a very like funny moment it is i think one of my favorite parts of the film it comes with a great deal surprise after movie that i didn't love all that much but this scene in particular i really enjoyed and so then to like finish that and go straight into less ceremony and see the same sort of trick happen uh of course you know like almost 30 years removed uh i was delighted i was like oh this is the the sort of visual motif and theme of the night is these these kind of integral moments played out while the credits roll well i don't want to go reaching too far here but if we're gonna do you know like the serpent eating itself uh reference points i'm gonna go back to brian depalma and just say that like what i was thinking about when the credits were rolling was blow out because the sound is playing outside in the night the way that it does in in that movie and what's so funny and strange about it is that you can't place if it's in the diagesis of the film i mean you know that it is but then there's a point that it crosses over where you're like is it now just like playing like is that just what we're hearing is the credits roll and i just i love that and i you know blood is a movie that i saw under like weird circumstances i was way too young to appreciate it um but i do love that about that film that there's uh you know there's so much sort of disorientation happening with the way that depalma uses sound in that movie um and the way that john travolta you john travolta's character uses sound and i like that this film sort of ends with something that the movie does a lot which is take sound in one aspect of a scene and sort of bleed it through to another they do this um with the donji of aani opera as well and a couple of other you know moments when there's um classical music playing and you sort of think it's the score of the film and then you realize it's coming from something you know within the the house i did want to ask you guys what you thought about this one little moment do you remember at the end of psycho when anthony perkins is uh saying you know talking as the mother and this is she wouldn't even hear to fly and as they dissolve we see a brief flash of the mother's skeletal face her skull yeah when when the girls are in the kitchen with the dead dad on the floor and they're having coffee they suddenly have a quick dissolve yes and shabrol said that that little quick dissolve was supposed to uh indicate a little passage of time that maybe they were sitting there for a minute or two for me the idea of of the folia du and the and the the transference of their their mental madness and that they have to now finish this job they've desecrated the house they've killed dad they're they haven't been figured out yet because they've got time to finish a coffee but to me that's like a moment where where the madness is now fully taken over that there's a weird dissolve between these two people where they are that it doesn't dissolve it doesn't dissolve anything new it dissolves it it you see the two of them and then it dissolves to them still sitting there having their coffee and then they go into the next room and kill everybody else yes and uh what did you guys think of that am i barking up the wrong tree here no it felt like uh an indication of the the pure madness is now taken hold i 100 agree with you i love the little dissolve because not that much time passes it's just like a handful of frames it feels like it's not even like another couple sips of the coffee it's like between the point that they drink once and then put the cup down on the table also noteworthy to me in this final scene when they barge into the living room the movie accounts for six total gunshots so Sophie shoots George twice in the kitchen and then we see her reload the gun when they come into the living room Jean shoots Jill the son one time shoots the daughter another time and Sophie shoots the mother and the daughter each she then reloads does finishing shots in both the girls and then the final shots into the bookshelf are not accounted for we do not see them reload in fact we specifically see them not reload before they point the gun elsewhere and start firing and that's not to say that those aren't actually there just that the film has done work to diegetically show us that all the bullets are accounted for and then sort of leans into the fantasy of it all where these guns have as many bullets as they need in order to get the job done mm-hmm i feel like shabrol you know he said i love murder in an interview where he was talking about why he has so many movies about murderous people he just said i love it you know like it's not that he's in favor of murder but he understands that like you know if you're a good genre filmmaker this is your bread and butter and um you know he he's given the audience in this movie a great deal to think about like i was haunted by this movie for days after i saw it and um and but it's such a good movie that it continues to reveal itself um it's not all there on the first viewing like i've seen it like three or four times but i swear to god when i was watching it again getting ready for the show my heart was racing uh not because i didn't know what was going to happen but because of the certainty with which shabrol was taking us to where it has to go uh it's just so thrilling i um stopped the film with about 30 minutes left um to go to bed because it was late last night and i texted erin and was like somebody's gonna die like i just like i just felt it you know you just know you know like you there's a there's an inflection point in the film and i don't even know when it is but there is this sense of like certain doom that takes over as you are watching and shabrol is really good about you know sort of like curating this sense of unease from the jump like even their very first conversation in the restaurant i'm just like what's going on here like who are these people and what are they talking about and are they talking about the things that they're talking about are they talking about other things and the mother is emphasizing constantly how remote the house is and i was like well that can't be fucking good like why why do we need to know that um but like it it does concretize into something that feels um you know like an inevitability at a certain point and that dissolve that you're talking about i totally had the same feeling i didn't even really take it as a passage of time and more as just like there is a like a solidifying of the terror that is now like run amok in this house that this dissolve you know is sort of revealing to us and importantly you know with Sophie's character she never ever reveals to Jean that she is illiterate and what i like about that is that Sophie is like living in this you know prison i won't say of her own making but she certainly doesn't do anything to extract herself from it as you said jesse she's like constantly on the verge of being humiliated and and living in fear and uh with Jean Jean also doesn't know the secret about her but she is the only person who doesn't know the secret about her who Sophie is completely at ease with there is no like terror of this woman finding out that you know i can't read and i'll be humiliated she has a couple of moments where she asks or she sort of like manipulates Jean into doing the thing that she wants her to do the way she does with other people but there is a point at which they cross over into territory where like the rules of society including the fact that Sophie is illiterate don't matter in their relationship anymore and she is totally free in a way that she isn't with anyone else and to me that dissolve is like the psychic break the final psychic break it's like they have gone so far that there's actually only one more step which is to kill everybody else yes and that little dissolve is like the end of of of reality for these right completely well and it's one more traversing of one of those boundaries that are all over the film as you mentioned right like these are all physical up to this point but also metaphorical and in this sense they are crossing the gate so to speak but it's a purely psychological gate i love the way the movie does this throughout as you just mentioned carly like there is a isolated feel to the lilyives home that isn't present when they first meet in the cafe before they go to britney and then also in the town shabroll communicates so much of this through the sound design uh where you hear the hustle and bustle everywhere when she is around other people and then when she's in the home it's just like wind and bird song you know there's like nothing out there there's this isolation uh the gate is one boundary that's constantly kind of passed also the road as this liminal space between town and home uh the staircase functions as this as well the same way it does in parasite right where the the moment that you mentioned jesse where they're looking down on the family is preceded just moments ago by a uh ascendants and you get that same sort of thing in parasite where they're very intentional about the ascension to the higher class and into their home and then also walking back down the steps every time they have to go home uh this is also present in another movie that i have to get in and mention that is also a reference point for bong joon-ho which is joseph losi's 1963 film the servant uh carly's nodding her head like of course you have to mention joseph losi on the show he is a recent favorite of mine within the past couple of years uh and just a phenomenal film that also deals with these same subjects of class resentment goes into a uh place of equal sort of psychological derangement and delusion by uh by the movies and though on whose behalf i will leave a surprise for you until you watch it listeners yeah i mean to me like this is a dangerous movie to me because it is a film that gets you to try to kind of semi-identify with the the kinds of things that you should never be able to identify with like like it's very difficult for a director to make a movie about um a sort of folia dude that's not romanticizing and is not uh exploiting it is matter of fact uh shabrol is not telling you how to feel about any of the stuff that you see in the film uh nobody gets what they deserve in this film uh the closest that uh the crime does not pay i suppose is the lesson that we can draw from the end of the movie but but uh the punishment for the way that this family is treating sophie is not death but they hand out that death sentence and um and it's dangerous to be to to watch a movie with uh that has such a psychological understanding of why people go off the deep end and what happens when a crazy person finds another crazy person which is you know something that we see all the time on twitter right now hey yeah well and you know jessie like it it makes sense to me that you know when the revolution comes the reactionaries the property owners the capitalists uh the the bourgeois and even perhaps some members the the landlords they they will all face the wall right like these people will uh be brought forth uh to perform a struggle session uh and denounce repent or otherwise face far worse fates yeah um that's just the way things go and you know are these revolutionary icons sandrine bonair and is bill hupair no no i will say i found uh jon's death to be incredibly satisfying yeah yeah and then when they like show that it's the priest and you just like fucking barreled into her in a van i was like this is good and that's when you know it's funny like that he kills her like is yes well and the other just like fucking hilarious the other slide joke in there as well is if you recall uh i think it's hoopair who suggests when they're leaving that the priest is having sex with the woman at the church who happens to be the woman that he is driving with late at night in the van to god knows where so no it's good kind of confirms the suspicions that they're they're in a relationship and also the joke uh at the end when we see um is bill hupair on the stretcher dead being taken away and the cops are saying it's not your fault you know it's so funny clearly it's clearly not your fault is what the police officer says to the priest don't don't feel bad father there's no way it could have known obviously not your fault this person is dead but but if you but you know what we have to consider that maybe the priest did mean to kill isabel hupair and knew that they wouldn't be able to pin it on him maybe he was laying in weight in the van outside the lelev estate to like drive the car full tilt into isabel hupair's car so he and nobody can prove that i did it on purpose uh-huh well that's the thing right the refrain constantly in this film is like nobody could prove it nobody can prove it and you know the the police being like yeah it's totally fine like this isn't your fault is like another like the mirroring that you're talking about in this movie right when that you know statement that jon makes constantly even after they've killed the whole family nobody can prove it's the thing she says when she was she's talking about you know her daughter who she refers to as an it several times um she's like or the non-denial or the non-denial denial like what a mother killing her own child can you imagine that does you know that doesn't really answer the question did you do it no one of my favorite parts of this movie again if we're talking about the way that this movie is funny is when uh jon is talking about she's you know reveal it's a it's an incredibly dark it bone-chilling moment between her and sofi in this car late at night she's talking about what happened with her four-year-old daughter she's you know revealing uh with each sentence the sort of horror of the of the incident and you know how her child's face was blistered when she kicked her into the stove and all this stuff but she says at the end of this uh this just you know horrific description where she's just talking about everything so matter of factly and she's she's talking about her daughter as if she's a bad dog basically like a pet um but she says you know one thing the police didn't think about is if i wanted to kill my kid i could have aborted her in the beginning so there goes that theory of me murdering my daughter because if i wanted to do that i would have just had an abortion i was just like this movie is sick maybe the child just had bad vibes you know we don't know i didn't kill the kid because i could have done that already already speaking of this ending with plan b like i don't want to nitpick too much of this and i know that part of it is that these characters are psychopaths but it's so funny to me that they've just fired what 10 shotgun rounds around a house and she's like i'm gonna clean up uh there's no way for the police to prove this well there absolutely is like gun shot residue and like paraffin tests have been around since like the 30s i think like if i if i'm not mistaken like they can 100 identify you as the person who fired the gun yeah well they they show her putting the guns back on the gun rack and it's like um it's going to be very obvious they're going to check the guns and see that they've been recently fired and that the shells the shells match the box of yeah gun shells that you've bought you know it's like not a perfect crime here no she wipes something she wipes the gun down with like a paper towel and she does a badge like you can see her handling the gun in specific places and then like missing those places when she's wiping the fingerprints it's like oh they're they're not thinking this through at this point this is just pure insanity but this is you know this is also the arrogance of thinking that the laws of the universe don't apply to us right yes which the two of them together the vowel and the consonant uh you know that the basically in uniting and joining forces and doing the stuff they're sealing their own fates yeah i think talking about this movie has made me really love it and it's not that i didn't like it before i i thought it was like marvelous and like an insane feat of filmmaking to bring me in the way that it did with a type of film or i should say just like french cinema in general i have a hard time like accessing we um talked about umbrellas of sherburg on a podcast called how have you not seen and i fucking hated that movie and then like we talked about it more and i was like oh there are actually like lots of things about this film that i really like and it was through the exchange i did not fucking hate this film for the record i i quite enjoyed it but talking about it with you jesse has made me really really appreciate all of what it's doing and also affirms for me what you said that when i go back and watch this a second time and i will that it will become even richer which is that's the type of movie i like yeah i mean i gotta i gotta i gotta give a shout out to a movie that i've seen four or five times which is a fresh viewing every time i watch it like i i really was uh had an accelerated heartbeat when it was over because it's just such incredible filmmaking one of the great examples as well of late style filmmaking like shabrol is like 66 years old or something when he made this movie but it is completely vital um an exciting film with almost invisible technique like there is subtle camera movements the thing that bong joon hou is always talking about in the criterion interview with him is shabrol's use of pans yeah simple camera movements to direct your eye to things and to to um it's a way of almost doubling your editing like you don't have to edit so much if the camera is going to show you what you need to see and the way that shabrol uses off-screen sound and uh and and someone will be talking off-screen and the camera will quickly pan over to see who's talking uh this all has a cumulative effect and um it's it's it's um it's a very well-made movie even if it's not obviously a very well-made movie it is yeah it is capital d director mr clod shabrol uh yeah i mean you should there are something like 55 clod shabrol movies so many movies this is i mean this is the thing i think that is uh maybe a deterrent and or has been for me historically is you know when you start to look at the output of some of these french new waivers and specifically shabrol like just how incredibly prolific he is it's like are you prepared to watch 55 movies you need to be in order to get the full shabrol experience yeah or or the way that um as i said at the top the the french new wave guys uh they looked down on shabrol in the mid sixties because he was making dumb guy entertainment while they were trying to recreate cinema those um veterans i mean shabrol was one of the last of the gang to die it was like shabrol eric roamer agnes varda jucker vad they made it into the late 2000s early 2010s but of all those people the guy who was still working at top flight towards the end of his directing career with shabrol like yeah i think this is probably the best film he ever made sort of the both brian de palma and the clint eastwood yeah of the french new waivers if you will i had to get both of them in there uh well and also you know like if we're considering shabrol as that guy like de palma is the same way i feel like he gets discounted often for making kind of sleazy genre pictures but he is one of those uh you know new hollywood guys like he's a contemporary of all the greats who many people talk about i think with much more reverence than they do de palma often and you know certainly his later efforts have maybe not been quite like if you put up domino next to killers of the flower moon i i know which one most people are going to say is the better work but that's not to discredit the fact that what de palma was doing was singular and interesting and provocative within his own sandbox and the best of the de palma movies of the latter part of his career are ones that owe a specific debt to the french new wave and to go dard yes one hundred percent agree uh well now i think it's time for us to just go on a shabrol deep dive maybe he becomes he becomes one of the guys you know hang out with with claud for a little while yeah please invite me back on the show for an episode about the tiger loves fresh meat oh that's a sixties movie you guys only do nineties movies well i'd still talk about it with you you can talk about all of them we'll we'll do a a retrospect that'll be our next thing is a clod shabrol podcast just front to back watch through kind of thing you know i was like please never do that shabrol trap house anyone i just didn't want to infringe upon i don't want to do director or podcast because we know people that do that and i don't i don't want to do that clod castee for me yeah don't that was excellent i felt jake serwin in the room with us there uh no we will not be probably venturing that far uh fell but there are other great nineties shabrol works as we've already mentioned on this uh episode long fair is definitely one that we'll get to eventually and i think that you will very much like i mean you both have made it sound fascinating and wonderful yes and it is of course without end um unlike this show which unfortunately does at some point have to come to all good jesse all good podcast episodes must come to an end guys true correct uh and so with that i guess we will bidadu reluctantly to the great jesse hawkin uh for today jesse thank you so much as always you have been a total delight and just a a wealth of information well i'm so glad that uh i got to talk about this movie with you sometimes i think of great nineties movies and then i think where what show should i talk about this movie on should i do it on my show or should i do it on hit factory and i pitched my way on here to do shabrol with you because you guys uh talk about the very best of the decade and i think this is definitely maybe the best french movie of the nineties and one of the best movies of the decade hmm you've convinced me of that i agree with you yeah jesse for those who want to follow along with you and your work uh online around the internet where can people do that well i'm still on twitter under my name uh i'm on blue sky more and more i like it over there as we've joked it's twitter without the nazis and also you can find me on twitter at junk filter pod and i do host the junk filter podcast you guys have been on it you guys will be coming back on it and uh we also have a patreon uh for only five dollars a month dozens of bonus episodes i just did a two-parter about the people versus oj simpson american crime story and part one part one is for the public part two is for the patrons they're both really really good episodes um but yes you get uh exclusive episodes every month and it's only five bucks a month i just listened to the fresh episode oh with a friend jamelle friend of the pod jamelle uh lovis and man that's a movie i've had on my watch list forever and when i saw that you two were talking about it i was like okay well now is the time yeah i don't know if this is what inspired it but carly has been uh a way house sitting and yesterday texted me in the evening and was like i'm watching uptown girls right now which i looked up and i was like i don't know if i remember this movie to find oh i do remember this movie and it is also a boaz yakin film so he's great he's a very special director yeah yeah well he certainly started his career off right that's one of the best films of the decade too yeah but um jamelle's enthusiasm for fresh was so infectious that i invited him on the show and we had a terrific conversation he was effusive about it afterwards i think he i think i uh i i think i re-energized the man yeah no you absolutely did of course you absolutely did you have that gift jesse you do that a lot no that's not i that's like real life you totally did i i i watched that unfold i feel like that conversation which by the way is a very good one um definitely like gave gave him life um and yeah i love junk filter i famously don't like podcasts and i famously don't like movie podcasts and junk filter is one of the only ones i listen to because it's just that good it's a fantastic show that's my pitch i hate movie podcasts and i listen to two yes and i am uh more moderate on movie podcasts but listen religiously to junk filter as well fantastic show fantastic hosts thank you jesse so much for being here again from our end of things you can follow along with the show at hit factory pod that's twitter that's instagram uh we also have a patreon patreon.com/hitfactorypod where for just five dollars per month you get access to bi-weekly bonus content the full hit factor experience and an invitation to the hit factory discord where the conversation is always popping off we're talking about new movies we're talking about 90s movies we are sharing extremely legal files of hard to find features uh in the discord on occasion so if you want access to that it's just five dollars per month you get in it's a great community we've starred in there lots of cool people having great conversations about movies and everything else you can think of if you enjoyed what you heard today we would also love it if you found an opportunity to leave us some stars maybe five of them uh and some words on the show on either apple or spotifier wherever you listen to the podcast if you didn't care for what you heard disregard uh don't do anything just turn this off as of right now i will give a shout out to our capitalist overlords channel your antagonisms into your dreams correct i will give a shout out to our capitalist overlords their names are linda jared murray jeff zang andrew eaton thank you all so much for your continued support and we will catch you all on the next one take care everybody [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
