Cinema: Servant Problem

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Les Abysses is drawn from a celebrated French murder case of 1933, which also inspired Jean Genet's drama The Maids. Selected by Andre Malraux as France's entry in the 1963 Cannes film festival, it arrives in the U.S. trailing breathless encomiums from Jean-Paul Sartre ("Cinema has given us its foremost tragedy"), and Simone de Beauvoir ("One of the greatest films I have ever seen"). Since such illustrious, finely honed sensibilities are not easily ignored, the ordinary moviegoer probably ought to read what has been written about the movie instead of actually sitting through it. Only cultists will want to take the stuff straight.

Despite its ineptitude, deep within the murky horror of Les Abysses there are glimmerings of intelligent despair. Two half-demented lesbian sisters (played by real-life sisters Francine and Colette Berge), employed as housemaids on a poverty-ridden farm in the Bordeaux region, are afraid that jobs and home will be sold away by their indifferent masters. Unable to sabotage the deal, they ultimately go berserk and commit two savage murders.

Ostensibly, the girls are pitiable embodiments of evil—monsters created by callousness, oppression, and the unnatural conditions of servitude. But Director Nico Papatakis and Scenarist Jean Vauthier twist this black theme into a cinema of absurdity that falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In its liveliest moments, Les Abysses is unwittingly hilarious, an amateur Grand Guignol about a pair of sleazy, sullen chambermaids running amuck in Bedlam. When they are not dancing or screaming, they stab the furniture with hatpins, chip the plaster, bring in termites, pulverize the best china, wallop their mistress, throw fish at her daughter, uncork the wine vat, scrape rubbish off the floor and dump it into the master's soup. "What did you put in the closet?" asks one. "The chicken droppings," replies the sister.

By the time the girls get around to their really lethal mischief, one wielding a flatiron, the other a kitchen knife, the audience is too sated with lunacy and violence to absorb any message—except possibly to beware of sleep-in maids.