Murderous Maids

The Papin sisters and their crimes have been the subject of numerous works of fiction. The 2000 French film, Murderous Maids is the second film inspired by this case to be featured on this site. The first was the 1996 British film, Sister, my Sister. I don’t want to categorize entire the tone of an entire nation’s cinema based on only two films. But I’m going to anyway. The British adaption of these events is chilly, repressed and somewhat understated. The French Murderous Maids is salacious and significantly more sexualized. In this instance, I’m giving the edge to the British version. At some point when making a film about murder, incest and class issues you gotta ask yourself, how many nude scenes does this movie really need?

Previous film adaptions of the Papin sisters took cues from plays that likewise adapted the events. Sister, My Sister as well as Jean Genet’s The Maids began life as plays. Murderous Maids is a change of pace. Its genre is more biopic than play adaption. We get more back story about sisters Christine and Lea. The film depicts their childhoods, turbulent home life and early, mostly innocent connection between the sisters. Only once older sister, Christine has experienced enough bad psychological events to partially explain her mental state do we get to the crux of the story. Though even here, the focus is unusual. The film focuses heavily on build-up. The actual murder is a very brief scene. Mostly, the film depicts mistreatment from employers, men and family. Christine in particular struggles with her position as a maid while Lea is mostly positive about it until the end.

Yet despite this focus on backstory and character, this still feels like a pretty shallow portrait of these real life people. There’s probably no way to make this story not exploitative. Even at the time, this case was not about the individuals but what they “represented.” Class issues is a common theme for depictions of this case. And it is present in Murderous Maids, though somewhat decentralized. There’s many a scene where Christine will be walking through a street of unrest and protest. Or shots of it happening outside the window of the house she works in. It’s a really interesting method of showing historical context. However, I ended up more interested in that context than in the film’s focus on some singularly fucked up siblings.

Because the core relationship here features incest and a underage manipulation, it’s highly debatable if Murderous Maids falls into the WLW category. The sisters’ desire for each other probably isn’t based on attraction to femininity. All I know is this movie features a lot of scenes of two female actresses having sex with one another. Like, too many. I really think the sex scenes detract from this movie and particularly the depiction of this relationship. This relationship is obviously fucked up. The sex scenes usually aren’t. Viewed without context, they really are just scenes of two young, skinny women having enjoyable sex. Sex scenes are a great way to explore things like power dynamics in a relationship. But Murderous Maids feels more focused on getting a good view of some breasts.

Murderous Maids definitely cranks the ick factor of the relationship up from Sister, My Sister or The Maids. The characters weren’t related in The Maids. Sister, My Sister had the sisters meet as near strangers once they were already adults. Murderous Maids doesn’t give you such easy outs. It makes sure the audience understands they knew each other as children and siblings before this began. It also heavily plays up the age difference. The younger Lea was considered to be the less smart sibling. The film’s take on this is to make her act like a literal child and confirm she was under the age of majority for all of the events. It’s not like it’s okay to do incest or murder when you’re an adult (Lea was 21 at the time of her arrest), but Murderous Maids really wants you to see this character as a child.

The focus of the film is definitely Christine over Lea. Fair enough. Historical writings claim that Christine was the dominant personality and Lea’s own sense of self disappeared in favour of being her sister’s shadow. That doesn’t come across in the film. For all that Lea is portrayed as childlike, she’s as likely to instigate or suggest something as Christine. I would’ve loved to see a lot more of Lea mimicking Christine and diminishing her own sense of self than what’s here in the movie. I also would’ve loved to see more of Lea decoupling from Christine following their arrest. As the film shows it, as soon as she was out of Christine’s grasp, she gave up on her. This quick turnaround likewise undermines the potential theme of folie à deux and codependency.

For all my complaints about Murderous Maids, I can’t ignore that it is a very well made film. It’s well realized in terms of its focus as well as technical aspects like set design and costumes. The performances are also really good. It comes down to a level of personal taste. This movie made me feel icky. That’s what it set out to do, so it achieved that aim. But I can’t exactly recommend a movie that made me feel this icky as. Personally, I wanted to see more weird psychological shit and less focus on the incest specifically. The Papin sisters inspired many fascinating fictional depictions of psychological co-dependence and shared mental states. Murderous Maids’ focus is more like, wouldn’t it be fucked up if two sisters had sex and did a murder? And it is fucked up. But I wanted a little more than that.

Overall rating: 6.0/10

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