Murderous Maids

Two sisters work as maids in the same provincial French house. Christine and Léa are more attached to each other than to their mother or to anything outside; they work in silence for years and the bond between them closes into a world of its own. One evening in 1933 they kill the woman of the house and her daughter. The film does not construct the murder as a mystery; it shows step by step how things arrived there, how daily obedience accumulates. The Papin case became far more than a murder file in France, the subject of dozens of texts running from psychoanalysis to theatre, from arguments about class to feminist readings. Jean-Pierre Denis takes up none of those interpretations, contenting himself with the sisters' ordinary life. Sylvie Testud and Julie-Marie Parmentier play almost without speaking; the tension comes from looks and from the sounds in the kitchen.