Jean-Pierre Denis • Murderous Maids

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY ABOUT MURDEROUS MAIDS

"A riveting re-telling of the most sensational French crime of the 20th century!"
-- J. Hoberman, Village Voice

"Sylvie Testud gives a performance of bone-chilling intensity!"
­ Stephen Holden, The New York Times

"Fascinating! Sylvie Testud and Julie-Marie Parmentier are magnificent!"
-- Le Figaro (Paris)

"Testud's depiction of madness evokes pity and terror on a scale to satisfy Aristotle's definition of tragedy!"
-- Amy Taubin, Village Voice

"A dramatic knockout on virtually every level!"
-- William Wolf

"An honest and beautiful portrait of a life from hell to hell."
-- International Herald-Tribune

"Sylvie Testud and Julie-Marie Parmentier are eerily convincing! Murderous Maids has been holding its own in French cinemas since its release and may well garner awards for its talented leads! Pic has garnered enthusiastic press in France, where the Papin sisters have gathered as much ink over the years as the JonBenet Ramsey murder has in the U.S." -- Variety

Almost seventy years on, the case of the Papin sisters, the servants who murdered and mutilated their mistress and her daughter in pre-second World War Le Mans, remains an enigma. The most extreme crime committed by women against women on record, little wonder that itÊs provided fertile ground for successive generations of feminists, historians, sociologists and artists. This, however, is the definitive screen version: at once a stunning dramatization of the events leading up to the tragedy, and a compelling interrogation of the class-issues which are generally believed to have contributed to the incident.

Rendered in a succession of harshly beautiful images, Murderous Maids is propelled by a star-making performance from Sylvie Testud as Christine, the "dominant" sister: grim-faced, implacable, her whole body clenched with resentment at the countless petty indignities she must endure. For director and co-writer Jean-Pierre Denis it marks a return to cinema after an absence of more than a decade and his intelligence is apparent in every frame as he documents the symbiotic relationship between the sisters with a cool, ascetic precision, all the more horrifying for its lack of excess." ­ Edinburgh Film Festival catalogue

"L'AFFAIRE PAPIN"

For Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who devoted books to the case, the sisters were martyrs to the class struggle, downtrodden victims of an oppressive bourgeoisie. "There is certainly a class of women who deduct from their maid's wages the cost of a broken plate," fumed de Beauvoir. "In our eyes, those women deserve death 100 times over."

But more recent accounts have found little evidence of class warfare in the Le Mans home of René Lancelin, a prominent lawyer, his wife and his daughter, Geneviève. The Papins worked there apparently uneventfully for six years; nobody who knew them heard them complain of intolerable treatment.

Modern investigations have focused on the fragile psychological condition of Christine, who may have been raped by her father when young.

There have also been suggestions that the sisters were embroiled in an incestuous relationship. Jacques Lacan, a French psychiatrist, used the case to formulate a new theory of paranoid hysteria. It also helped inspire a psychological novel, Captive, by Margaret Atwood, the Canadian winner of the Booker prize.

It was on a February evening in 1933 that Lancelin returned home to find the lock on his front door broken. From the garden he could see a candle flickering in the attic window of the maids' room, but nobody answered his calls. Unable to get into the house, he went to the local police station for help.

The sight that greeted the policeman who broke in through a downstairs window defied belief. "I have never seen bodies so atrociously mutilated," a pathologist testified later. Upstairs, the policeman found the Papin sisters lying naked in bed, their arms around each other. They immediately admitted the murders.

Within days the French newspapers had dubbed them the "monsters of Le Mans" and "the lambs who became wolves". In prison they were separated while awaiting trial, and Christine's mental condition deteriorated rapidly.

She would shriek obscenities and roll around on the floor of her cell in an apparent sexual frenzy, begging to be reunited with Léa. She once attempted to gouge her own eyes out and had to be put in a straitjacket.

Despite evidence of serious mental illness, Christine was found primarily responsible for the murders and sentenced to the guillotine. As the younger and more impressionable sister, Léa received 10 years' hard labor. In those days the death sentence was routinely commuted to life imprisonment for women, but in Christine's case the damage was already done.

Separated from Léa, she refused to eat and her hallucinations increased. She was transferred to an asylum, where she died in 1937. Most modern psychiatrists agree that she would today have been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

In his acclaimed film Murderous Maids, Jean-Pierre Denis will further disappoint left-wing radicals who cling to the Papins as warriors of the class struggle. Instead he focuses on their claustrophobic life in a tiny room at the top of a large house, where they become obsessed with each other and resentful of outsiders.

To the astonishment of everyone connected with the case, Léa Papin, the younger sister long presumed dead, was found to be alive [during the making of the Murderous Maids.]

Released in the 1940s, she lived quietly in Nantes, where she worked as a nanny, using a different name. None of her neighbors knew her identity.

However, [she could not be persuaded] finally to reveal the true motive for their assault. Stricken by a stroke, Léa, now 88, is unable to speak or write. -- Tony Allen-Mills, The Sunday Times of London

THE PAPIN SISTERS SEEN BY...

Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret
The Papin sisters were raised in a convent at Le Mans. Then their mother placed them in a "bourgeois" home in the town. For six years, in total submission, they put up with remarks, demands and insults. Fear, exhaustion and humiliation slowly nourished the hatred within them, this sweet liquor that secretly consoles with its promise of blending violence with physical force sooner or later. When the day came, Léa and Christine Papin paid evil back in its own coin, a coin struck with a red-hot iron. They literally massacred their employers, tearing out their eyes and smashing their skulls. Then they went to bed. The lightning had struck, the wood had burned and the sun had gone out for good..." -- from Le surréalisme au service de la révolution

Jacques Lacan
Christine and Léa were genuine Siamese souls. Between them, the two sisters couldn't even find the distance needed to wound each other... Christine must have gone through such torture before the desperate experience of crime tore her from her other self and allowed her, after the first hallucinatory fit in which she thought she saw her sister dead, to cry the words of blatant passion: "Yes, say yes!" -- from Les motifs du crime paranoïaque: les s¦urs Papin

Jean-Paul Sartre
I've seen the photos of these two pretty girls, these servants who killed and battered their mistresses. I've seen the photos before and after. "Before," their faces hovered like two docile flowers above their lace collars. They radiated clean living and appetizing honesty. A discreet curling iron had crimped their hair in a similar manner. And, even more reassuring than their waved hair, their collars and their air of being on a visit to the photographer, was their resemblance as sisters, the self-righteous resemblance that immediately brought blood ties and the natural roots of the family group to the fore. "After," their faces glowed like a blaze. They had the bare necks of the future beheaded. Wrinkles everywhere, horrible wrinkles of fear and hatred, folds, holes in the flesh as if a clawed beast had roamed round and round on their faces. And those eyes, those same big, dark and bottomless eyes... And yet, they no longer looked alike. Each, in her own way, bore the memory of their common crime ...

Simone de Beauvoir
In its broad outline, the tragedy of the Papin sisters was immediately clear to us. In Rouen, as in Le Mans, and perhaps even among the mothers of my pupils, there were no doubt women who deducted the cost of a broken plate from their maid's wages, who put on white gloves to find forgotten specks of dust on the furniture: in our eyes, they deserved death a hundred times over. With their wavy hair and their white collars, how sensible Christine and Léa Papin seem in the old photo that some papers published! How had they become those haggard furies offered up to public condemnation in the photos taken after the drama? One must accuse their childhood orphanage, their serfdom, the whole hideous system set up by decent people for the production of madmen, assassins and monsters. The horror of this all-consuming machine could only be rightfully denounced by an exemplary act of horror: the two sisters had made themselves the instruments and martyrs of a somber form of justice... For two bourgeois women hacked to pieces, a bloody atonement was required...The killer wasn't judged. He acted as a scapegoat...

Dr. Louis Le Guillant
As a psychiatrist says: "I'm asked to cure human beings but, three-quarters of the time, I'm totally ineffective. I would need to cure their lives too." It was all but impossible to "cure the lives" of the Papin sisters... -- from L'affaire des s¦urs Papin

"L'AFFAIRE PAPIN" AS SEEN BY THE PRESS OF THE TIME

THE CRIME
The Eye Gougers - Bernard Lauzac Police Magazine, February 12, 1933
I don't know how to begin the account of such a crime. Its ferocity attained an unprecedented degree and it's infinitely difficult to comprehend that human beings could have killed with such appalling savagery.

It all happened on Thursday, February 2, in the early evening, in Le Mans.

The Rue Bruyère, the very epitome of a quiet provincial street, with its narrow pavement and slightly uneven surface, with its regular, low, clean houses and its windows behind which passers-by are spied on, the Rue Bruyère was starting to fall asleep after a peaceful day, in the first shadows of evening, when a whole section of the street, the start of it, was filled with faint moans... groans... dull whimpering. These muffled cries faded out a littler further on, the silence of the rest of the street being stronger than they were.

It was 5 or 6 in the evening, there was no one around to hear these final appeals for life. A maid, Commander Blanchard's servant, in her kitchen, was able to make out faint whimpering sounds that reached her, muffled, for more than half an hour.

Someone who's not used to it," she thought, "someone making their first visit to the masseur across the street..."

And the moaning ceased, no one in the street had heard it, because the Rue Bruyère had remained deserted like any other calm provincial street. Two girls, two sisters, had just killed two women, their employers. The double crime of Christine and Léa Papin won't soon be forgotten. It will even remain, not only in Le Mans, but in criminal and legal annals, as one of the most terrifying and cruel murders ever committed."

THE TRIAL
The Papin sisters haven't yet revealed their secret Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, Paris-Soir- Oct.1, 1933
The door opens. Here they are! No photograph could render the mystery that enters with these two girls. Léa, the younger, all in black, with her hands in the pockets of her coat; Christine, in a beige overcoat, the collar turned up. They sit down. Léa still has her hands in her pockets, her eyes open but open on what, one cannot tell; Christine, on the other hand, makes a gesture to smooth her coat beneath her, like a meticulous girl who knows that such a movement must be made. She crosses her hands in front of her and remains motionless with an almost corpse-like rigidity.

She has her eyes closed and from one in the afternoon, when the hearing begins, until three in the morning when it ends, she doesn't open them once, not even to answer the questions that she is asked. Léa has a sallow, olive complexion, with handsome dark eyes that express nothing, neither surprise, nor fear, nor concern. Total indifference that never vanishes, even for a minute, and that one is wrong to call indifference: one should talk of absence.

Christine, on the other hand, seems to be sleeping but one can tell that she isn't. As soon as her name is called, she immediately sits up straight just as she probably did during mass at the chapel of the convent where she was raised. She looks like a medium who is about to be questioned.

Both girls have the clear foreheads of intelligent people, despite the fact that neither one is; their hair is neat and well cared for. Oh, no, there's nothing vulgar about them! Frequently, the people who employed them would say of them, "They're haughty!" This haughtiness has followed them to the assize court bench."

Have two madwomen been sentenced? - Etienne Hervier Police Magazine- November 12, 1933
The trial of the Papin sisters was also and above all that of the expert witnesses and the jury... What motive led the two servants to commit the crime? "There's no reason," the prosecution declared. So was this the act of two madwomen? Three experts were appointed. Their report was handed in. It is categorical, "Christine and Léa are perfectly normal." It was this report that the jury used as the basis for its verdict. But what is the true value of this report?... To judge these two girls, a special jury was required. Not a jury made up of honest citizens chosen among the grocers, cattle-traders or petty men of leisure of Le Mans, but a jury of doctors. They alone were capable of understanding what mysterious power, what sort of deep, animal resentment had suddenly burst out in the two sisters. And perhaps the Papin sisters should have been tried elsewhere than Le Mans. On seeing the elegant crowd packing the court, one would have thought that an even more severe tribunal was presiding above the magistrates...

SYLVIE TESTUD (Christine Papin)
Winner of the French Academy Award, the "César," for Most Promising Actress of the Year for her performance in Murderous Maids, Sylvie Testud (pronounced "Tes-TOO") was born in 1971 in Lyons. She made her feature film debut in John Lvoff's 1994 film, Couples et amants and has since appeared in some three dozen theatrical features and TV movies.

Testud made her breakthrough not in France, but in Germany, where her performance in Caroline Link's film, Beyond Silence, won her the "Lola," Germany's top film award, as Best Actress in 1997. She continues to shuttle between French and German cinema.

Her central role in Thomas Vincent's 1999 debut feature, Karnaval, brought Testud her first César nomination and the Michel Simon Prize. It was this film that brought her to the attention of Murderous Maids director Jean-Pierre Denis.

She has also appeared in several indie English-language pictures, including Jesse Peretz's The Chateau and Brian Skeet's The Misaventures of Margaret, with Brook Shields.

In 1998, using the pseudonym of Sylvie Voyer, she directed a short, Je veux descendre.

Testud's other recent features includes The Captive, Chantal Akerman's striking contemporary riff on Proust, for which she received a European Film Award nomination, and the soon-to-be-released Les Femmes... ou les enfants d'abord by leading French auteur Manuel Poirier.

In the theatre, Testud recently appeared in Harold Pinter's Moonlight and a rarely-performed Goethe play, Stella.

INTERVIEW WITH SYLVIE TESTUD
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST REACTION WHEN YOU WERE OFFERED THE PART OF CHRISTINE PAPIN?
Well, after reading the screenplay, I immediately wanted to be part of something this important. First of all, because of the story of these girls that I already knew from working on The Maids at drama school. The strange thing is that Jean Genet wrote the play to be performed by men. He wanted to keep it ambiguous so that people wouldn't understand. At the time, people had told me about the story of the Papin sisters and this love story between them intrigued me. So when I met [producer] Michèle Halberstadt and she told me that I would need to be totally available for the film, I backed out of everything else I was doing.
WAS IT A DIFFICULT PART?
It was exhausting. I was terrified because in spite of a great desire to play the part, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it. What happened in the lives of these sisters is horrifying. At the same time, I was touched by them. At one point, I even wondered if what they did was justifiable and I told myself that I'd soon find out...
HOW DID YOU WORK WITH JULIE-MARIE PARMENTIER?
We talked a lot but we didn't rehearse in the traditional sense. I'm someone who rehearses a great deal but, in this case, it was impossible. I didn't want to acquire the technique of this girl's madness that I don't understand. There were moments when I sensed that something had to happen and I ended up getting angry all alone to create her depression.

HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO GET INSIDE THE SKIN OF A CHARACTER THAT YOU COULDN'T IDENTIFY WITH?
Deep down, I'm a fairly flexible person. I don't have the stiffness of this character so I had to find it and the path to that lay through frustration. At first, I didn't really understand this but I realized it later. When we shot the scene where Christine confronts Madame Lancelin on the stairs, I felt that there was something that wasn't working. And I was ready to lay into the whole world because the crew said that everything was fine. There was a gap in the text and I needed a form of violence that I perhaps hadn't been able to find in myself. As a result, I managed to get the whole crew's back up and I found the energy in me to perform the scene. The strange thing is, this was the first time ever in my life that I needed the vision of the crew. At the moment of shooting, the technicians often have an intensity that we don't have. In fact, I used them as my inspiration to find this rigidity.

HOW DID YOU GET TO KNOW CHRISTINE?
Jean-Pierre gave me all the articles, including those by Jacques Lacan1, which was great, because no two writers agreed on anything! Another thing that helped me a great deal was an interview with Serge Gainsbourg that I heard on the radio. He said that if he hadn't been allowed to make music, he'd have gone mad. Now, I have the impression that Christine Papin is a woman who wouldn't have gone to such extremes if she'd been allowed to express what was inside. I think she was a frustrated woman, made mentally ill by her situation. I think that if my family hadn't allowed me to follow the path I wanted, I would have become pretty violent. Christine Papin is a victim but she doesn't know it and can't evolve. Little by little, her options are blocked off when she has fixed the salvation of her sister as her goal. Besides, there's nothing more humiliating than cleaning away the shit of people with white gloves.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE SOCIAL REVENGE THEORY?
Christine Papin was a very intelligent woman, but she was a victim of society. In 2000, you can come from a very modest background and make your way up. In 1930, it was impossible. It was frustration that urged her to make herself useful and important in the eyes of someone, in this case her sister, who's the only person in who loves her unreservedly. The dream was still alive in Léa. She even thought about getting married before something happened between the two sisters that would isolate them from the world.

DOES PERFORMING IN PERIOD COSTUMES MAKE THINGS EASIER?
It's important the first day. After, it's the audience that sees it. The shoes from the 30s that I wear in the film have these two-inch wooden heels that force you to stand upright and make a noise when you walk. When I felt too tired and my feet weren't in the frame, I'd shoot in my running shoes.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE MOTIVATION OF YOUR CHARACTER?
I'm convinced that Christine Papin was too intelligent to submit to what she was asked to do. Her religious upbringing left her with the notion that we're all here to suffer. When I saw a picture of Christine Papin taken the day after the murder, I decided not to even try to resemble her. She has the indescribable look of a lioness that hasn't eaten for four days, gazing at a zebra... But that goes beyond the actress' work. I think that if I'd known her, I would have liked to try to save her.

SYLVIE TESTUD: SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Couples et amants (1994)
Délit mineur (1995)
Le Plus bel âge (1995)
Jenseits der Stille (Beyond Silence) (1996)
Flammen im Paradies (1997)
The Misadventures of Margaret (1998)
Les Pierres qui tombent du ciel (1999)
Marée haute (1999)
Faux contact (1999)
Karnaval (1999)
Pünktchen und Anton (1999)
Tangos volés (2000)
Lucie (2000)
La Captive (2000)
Murderous Maids (Les Blessures assassines)
La Chambre obscure (2000)
Un moment de bonheur (2001)
Julie's Geist (2001)
Je rentre à la maison (IÊm Going Home) (2001)
Désobéissance (2001)
Allah bénit mon voyage
The Château
Aime ton père
Vivre me tue
Les Femmes... ou les enfants d'abord (2002)

JULIE-MARIE PARMENTIER (Léa Papin)
Born in 1977, Julie-Marie Parmentier began taken acting classes at the age of 9 and made her stage debut in 1993. At the same time, she was working for television when she met Noémie Lvovsky, who gave her parts in Les petites for Arte, then as one of four brilliant young actresses in La vie ne me fait pas peur (I'm Not Afraid of Life). Immediately following Murderous Maids, she gave a memorable performance as a teenaged heroin addict in Robert Guédiguian's La ville est tranquille, which was released in the U.S. last year as The Town is Quiet.

For her performance in Murderous Maids, she was nominated for a César as Most Promising Actress of 2000 (the award that went to Sylvie Testud) and won the Best Actress award at the Plata Del Mar Film Festival in Argentina.

INTERVIEW WITH JULIE-MARIE PARMENTIER
HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE PROJECT?
Through my agent. I turned up at the casting call with my hair in a crew cut. At the time, I was playing a girl who passes herself off as a boy to work as a chimney sweep. So I did my screen tests with a wig. It was tough, but screen tests are a matter of life or death to me.

DID YOU KNOW THE STORY OF THE PAPIN SISTERS?
Not at all. I asked my grandmother about them and she'd heard of them.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT THE PART FOR YOU?
Playing on her naiveté without overdoing it. In the film, Léa is in complete awe of her sister. She's not naturally independent like Christine, who made the break with their mother. So I think that she never really thought for herself and that she was even a little stupid. She wrote very poorly and, in the film, one of the employers accuses her of slurring her speech. In another scene, she doesn't realize that when Monsieur and Madame are resting, they're not taking a nap... But it's also her love for her sister that makes her so naïve.

HOW DID YOU APPROACH THE CHARACTER?
I started during the tests with Jean-Pierre [Denis]. We worked on the smile and the gaze. But the relationship that Léa has with Christine is something that I knew from my 15-year-old kid sister, with whom I'm very close, because she still has that purity and innocence.

DID THE FACT THAT IT WAS A PERIOD FILM HELP YOU?
The strange thing is that when I used to watch period films, even before becoming an actress, I thought to myself that it must be very hard to transpose yourself to another time. But, in the end, the work's the same. The sets and costumes help a great deal, but what's important is to always remember that Christine and Léa were maids who had to serve their mistresses. This position of inferiority still exists in some circles.

DID YOU FEEL THE NEED TO ADOPT A PARTICULAR THEORY TO PLAY THIS PART?
When you read the screenplay, you never even think of the idea of social revenge. When I saw the make-up on Geneviève [the murdered daughter], I felt ill, it was so realistic. At the same time, I had to wipe it from my mind, because if I played with it with compassion, it was all over! It's just impossible for me to understand a crime like that.

DID YOU IDENTIFY WITH LÉA?
As an actor, I try to avoid the idea of "identifying" with my role. For me, acting has two parts, conceptualizing and then actually performing. I don't believe you can perform a role without truly thinking it through first, and that sort of analysis is crucial--you understand the character, but you don't identify with them.

I can understand that it's Léa's love for her sister that may have led her to do what she did, even if I can't understand what triggered it. In any case, to play a character, you need to have some love for them.

HOW WAS IT WORKING WITH JEAN-PIERRE DENIS?
Jean-Pierre is a very surprising and touching person who knows what he wants. He's a dreamer who thinks a great deal and who's often lost in his thoughts. He seems like a child and that can be hard at times, because it requires a great deal of trust. I've witnessed the same thing in my acting teachers. They are the most interesting people because they've maintained their innocence. When we shot the love scene, Jean-Pierre wouldn't even look at the monitor. Out of modesty. That's unbelievable! I'd never seen anything like it!

JULIE MARIE PARMENTIER: FILMOGRAPHY
Les Petites (1998)
Les Hirondelles d'hiver (1999)
La Vie ne me fait pas peur (I'm Not Afraid of Life) (1999)
Le Choix d'Élodie (1999)
Les Blessures assassines (Murderous Maids) (2000)
La Ville est tranquille (The Town is Quiet) (2000)
Beauté fatale (2000)
Les Alizés (2001)
Le Ventre de Juliette (2002).


JEAN-PIERRE DENIS (director)
Jean-Pierre Denis is that rare film animal: a regional filmmaker, who has used his art to explore the historical, cultural and linguistic identity of his native Perigord, in southwest France. Born in 1946 at Saint-Léon-sur-l'Isle, Denis studied law in Bordeaux before entering the profession that he would exercise until the age of 38: customs inspector. (At least two other artists, American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and French naive painter Henri Julien "Douanier" Rousseau, made customs inspection their day job.) Having shot a number of short films in Super-8, Denis completed his first theatrical feature in 1980, Histoire d'Adrien, a period drama of peasant and working class life. Shot on a shoestring budget in 16mm with non-professional actors speaking in local dialect, Occitan (it was subtitled into French), the film harked back to the documentary/fiction aesthetics of pioneering regional filmmaker Georges Rouquier (Farrebique). Selected for the International Critics Week at the Cannes Film Festival, it won the coveted Caméra d'Or as best first feature. Denis followed his debut feature with a more conventionally fictional chronicle, La Palombière. He had to wait five years before completing his most hauntingly ambitious feature, Champ d'honneur (Field of Honor), which represented France at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Disgusted by the difficulties of financing this latter picture, which involved a period re-constitution of rural France during the war of 1870, Denis went back to his original profession. With the exception of a TV movie made for cultural channel Arte in 1993, he remained away from the film industry for 12 years, until producer Michèle Halberstadt asked him to write and direct Murderous Maids in 2000.

INTERVIEW WITH JEAN-PIERRE DENIS
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO DO THIS PROJECT?
I got a call at work from [producer] Michèle Halberstadt, who I'd known but lost track of since I'd last seen her in 1989. She suggested that I read Paulette Houdyer's book on the Papin sisters1 , offering to send me the minutes of the trial, the press clippings from the time and various other material... Michèle's call came just at a time when I was hoping to resume my screenwriting career. At first, in tackling the Papin script, I could only see the most obvious aspect of the case: the hideous crime. The character of Christine Papin frightened me. I could make out the enormous question mark hanging over the trial, the power of the story, but I didn't know which thread to pull or how to approach the characters.

Strangely, everything came together for me during an administrative meeting on the theme of VAT2 in the European Union. Go figure! ... That day, I realized that with the biographical elements in my possession, ranging from Paulette Houdyer's book to the numerous anecdotes, accounts or statements, I would be able to follow, almost step by step, the path of the two sisters from childhood. That very evening, I got to work, setting off with Christine, not yet knowing what would triumph between my attraction to her and my fear of her. From her childhood on, I knew what the film would be. I knew that I'd no longer leave Christine, whatever she might do.

DID YOU KNOW THE STORY BEFORE YOU WERE OFFERED THE MOVIE?
Yes, but in a very superficial way. I'd read Les Bonnes3, seen Les abysses4 but I had distant memories of both.

HOW DID YOU USE PAULETTE HOUDYER'S BOOK?
Both by carrying out a genuine work of adaptation, from the text and its spirit, and by relying on a large number of elements from the investigation or the court case. Paulette Houdyer, through her own research, through her meeting with Léa or with people close to Clémence [the Papins's mother], had filled in a lot of gaps in the sistersÊs story.

WERE YOU TEMPTED TO REHABILITATE THE CHARACTER OF CHRISTINE?
In presenting Christine's story, I tried to follow her life without making excuses for her or making it too easy for the audience to identify with her. It's very easy for a director to grow attached to one of his characters or fall in love with them, and you can't stop yourself from putting some of that feeling onto the screen.

WHAT IS YOUR VIEW OF HER?
The main issue in this story is that of crossing the line. In the changing relationship of the sisters or in the crime itself, I always had in mind the image of a dam bursting.

Their confined world, the closed setting of their daily lives, the aggravation of Christine's pathology no doubt all contributed to this outburst of violence, like a fatal return of reality.

THE FILM RUNS FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF. WAS THIS A DECISION MADE DURING WRITING OR DURING EDITING?
We could have made a film of one hour forty-five, even two hours. But the story decided. It follows a straight line.

IS THAT ALSO WHY THE MOVIE HAS NO MUSICAL SCORE?
That was a very difficult decision to make. After a first try and a failure with one composer, we set off in a different direction. There too, the film made the decision for us. It rejected all our musical options.

HOW DID YOU CAST THE FILM?
Having stopped making films, I was no longer familiar with actors, even though I was still going to movies that interested me.

Jeanne Biras, the casting director, introduced me to Sylvie Testud. After seeing Karnaval, I really didn't need to test her. I could sense and understand that this frail woman had all the power needed for the part.

From her first reading of the screenplay, Sylvie had a deep understanding of Christine. She grasped immediately the full dimension of the character and what she had done. For me, that was enormous. From that point on, we worked regularly together until shooting. Sylvie impressed me with her intuition, talent and capacity for work.

The search for Léa was longer and more difficult. Few girls had that blend of indolence and passivity that seemed vital to the character. But from the very first tests, in the way she listened and looked, Julie-Marie's power and emotion filled the screen. I think back on certain scenes, such as the one at the town hall where Léa's totally submissive in a scene powered by Christine. In a very precise way, she provides an immediately perceptible presence.

My trust in my actresses allowed me to deal calmly with sequences that weren't that obvious to handle on reading the screenplay, namely the romantic relationship or the unfolding of the crime.

YOU DIDN'T ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE TWO SISTERS LOOK ALIKE?
Sisters don't necessarily look alike. However, I thought a great deal about the relationship between them, its workings and alchemy. This is clear in the construction of the romantic relationship. Two sisters know each other, see each other naked, comb each other's hair, touch each other, sleep in the same bed... We're a long way from an encounter between two girls who are strangers. For me, the moment when everything changes is that of the intimate caress. I didn't want to turn this all-consuming sisterly affection into a modern relationship with a lesbian couple. In this scene, I allowed myself to be guided by a certain purity in the relationship, with its clumsiness and guilt. At the same time, I didn't want to be prudish, concealing flesh and sensuality. It's true that once the embrace and kisses begin, the rest of the scene interested me much less.


HOW DID YOU GUIDE THEM?
Both through the broad outline and more precisely with each gesture or each word. I have the impression of a long exploration that began well before the shoot. It was a matter of knowing the why and how of each gesture or emotion. After, you have the tumult, tension and exhaustion of the shoot. The preliminary work occasionally allows you to correct and guide an actor who is lost or who is starting to imagine something other than what you're after.

WHAT MADE YOU SHOOT IN THE ACTUAL SETTINGS?
In my work as a filmmaker, I've always lent a great deal of importance to places and to memory.

I realized that shooting such a story in Le Mans could present problems. This case left a permanent mark or negative image on the town. But I was attracted to the settings and to the ability to follow in the footsteps of the Papins, convinced that the film would draw additional power from this. While scouting locations, we found some residents to be distinctly reticent, especially in our search for bourgeois homes. Either flat refusals or the request not to shoot the bedroom scenes with the maids or, above all, the crime sequences in those locations.

But we were able to observe how legend works. While at the time of the murders and trial there were demonstrations demanding the execution of Christine and Léa, you now have the impression that today the Papin sisters are a sort of mythical couple in French popular lore.

JEAN-PIERRE DENIS: FILMOGRAPHY
1981 Histoire d'Adrien Caméra d'Or - Cannes Festival - 1980 Theatrical release - January 1981
1982 La Palombière Selected for "Perspectives" - Cannes 1983 Theatrical release - June 1983
1987 Champ d'Honneur Official selection, in competition - Cannes Festival 1987 Special Jury Prize, Florence Festival, 1987 Grand Prize, Intl. Young People's Film Festival, 1987 Theatrical release - September 1987
1993 Les yeux de Cécile (television) Broadcast on Arte, 1993-1994
2000 Murderous Maids (Les blessures assassines) Official selection Panorama - Berlin Festival 2001 4 Césars nominations French theatrical release - November 2000 U.S. theatrical release - April 2002 (Rialto Pictures)

LINKS TO PUBLICATIONS:

THE PAPIN SISTERS DOSSIER
NY Times At The Movies Column April 19, 2002
NY TImes Review April 14, 2002
NY Times Arts & Leisure April 14, 2002
Village Voice Feature Article
Village Voice Review

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