A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Sunday, August 2, 2026

Les Abysses (Nikos Papatakis, 1963)

Francine Bergé and Colette Bergé in Les Abysses

Cast: Francine Bergé, Colette Bergé, Pascale de Boysson, Colette Régis, Paul Bonifas, Jean-Louis Le Goff, Lise Daubigny, Robert Benoit, Marcel Roche. Screenplay: Jean Vauthier, Louis Jouvet. Cinematography: Jean-Michel Boussaguet. Film editing: Edwidge Bernard, Denise de Casabianca, Pascale Laverrière. Music: Pierre Barbaud. 

Nikos Papatakis's raw, unsparing Les Abysses is one of the many films, plays, and even operas inspired by the case of the Papin sisters, Christine and Léa, who in 1933 murdered their employer's wife and daughter. The most distinguished of the artistic treatments of the case are probably Jean Genet's 1947 play The Maids and Claude Chabrol's 1995 film La Cérémonie, but Papatakis's version stands up well against them. It opens with the mad antics of the two maids, called Michelle (Francine Bergé) and Marie-Louise (Colette Bergé) in this version of the story. They have been left alone in the country house of their employers and have spent the time wreaking havoc in the property. The employers, the Lapeyres, have been taking advantage of the two women, withholding their wages for three years but promising them that they will be given part of the property as recompense. Now the Lapeyres return unexpectedly to discover the house, which they are planning to sell, in chaos. When Michelle and Marie-Louise discover they're about to be cheated out of their expectations, things escalate. The film was widely interpreted as a fable about capitalism and the class system as well as a kind of allegory of the exploitation of colonial Algeria by France. It's a mad, brutal work with uninhibited performances by the Bergé sisters, and a nerve-racking score by Pierre Barbaud adds to the dissonance of the relationships shown in it. 

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