Murderous Maids respins a popular story.

By Johnny Ray Huston

TODAY, IF you're caught doing the bloody crime, you get the airtime, and maybe an Ann Rule mass-market paperback soon to be made into a TV movie. "True" narratives of people killing people now constitute a bookstore genre, but few murderers have inspired intellectual and cinematic scrutiny to the degree of Christine and Léa Papin. In Le Mans, France, in 1933, the Papins – sisters, lovers, and maids – pummeled the mother-daughter faction of their employers beyond recognition, then hopped in bed together to wait for the inevitable arrival of authority figures. Within the next few months, that parade of figures expanded beyond the obvious legal and media professionals to include names such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Lacan. The former two viewed the sisters as martyrs of a class war, while Lacan used them for a sub-textbook illustration of paranoid psychosis taken to an illogical end.

The divine secrets of the Papin sisters' kill-kill sisterhood have also been reenacted on stage and screen. Changing the names and bloody details, Jean Genet's The Maids emphasizes a Catholic fervor stuck in childhood. Nancy Meckler's 1994 film Sister My Sister (adapted from a play by Wendy Kesselman) takes a baroque Masterpiece Theatre-gone-awry approach, while Claude Chabrol's 1995 La cérémonie modernizes the tale to chilly comic effect, thanks to Isabelle Huppert's performance as a conniving postal worker. The latest addition to this increasingly lengthy movie marathon, Jean-Pierre Denis's Murderous Maids, is comparatively realist and understated; the campiest touch is an element of the promotional material: a stylized version of a famous Papin sisters mug shot that – adding nuances to a stark and impenetrable original image – portrays Christine (Sylvie Testud) as defiant and crafty and Léa (Julie-Marie Parmentier) as dimly obedient to her older sister's rebelliousness.

Like Bruno Dumont (La vie de Jésus, L'humanité), Denis is devoted to filming his home region of France; his first feature had to be translated from local dialect into French. Disenchanted by the broader movie industry, he had abandoned directing for his previous job of customs inspector until the cinematic ghosts of the Papins came knocking. Placing class commentary in the background and moving Christine Papin's mindset to the fore, Murderous Maids (the French title, Les blessures assassines, translates to "The killer wounds") manages to make its wide screen intimate and sometimes claustrophobic – when Christine escapes to the streets to talk to herself, Jean Marc-Fabre's camera accompanies her. Critic David Noh recently compared Testud to the young Bette Davis, an analogy that brings across her physical presence, which veers from wild beauty (at one point Christine slams a mirrored door shut as if she can't stand the sight of her sexiness) to homely repression.

Testud has the tough job of conveying Christine's growing madness as she hides it from those around her. Though Denis's film isn't as clinical and conservative as Lacan's quasi-case study – which presents lesbianism as an element of the sisters' pathology – it rarely uses visual corollaries of Christine's mindset, and when it does (a mop scurrying across the floor like a noisy, untamed pet), the effect is heavy-handed. Denis, with Michèle Halberstadt, adapted a novelistic account by Paulette Houdyer, and his devotion to the Papin sisters' history is as methodical and diligent as their devotion to housework: the movie's last line of dialogue is Christine's final, oft-interpreted plea to her sister, "Say yes, say yes!" But whereas Christine's single-minded work ethic drives her to talk to stubborn jars that won't open, Denis remains detached, collecting ingredients (religious zealotry, the cruelties of class hierarchy, a fractured family prone to mental illness) rather than providing an overriding reason. His sole stylistic flourish is an aerial view of a funeral procession that paints Jacques Demy's beloved pastel umbrellas a deathly black.

Confronting the Papins, Murderous Maids favors a version rather than aversion, but written accounts scarcely bother to humanize them. The most artfully phrased, Janet Flanner's short essay in Paris Was Yesterday, is at least democratic in hurling haughty disdain, mocking virtually all other commentators on the case. Flanner savors morbid descriptions, likening the heads of the murder victims to "blood puddings" and the knife marks on their bodies to "the way a fancy French baker notches his finer long loaves." Neither heavenly creatures (to cite the title of Peter Jackson's contribution to a Papin-dominated cinematic subgenre) nor silent twins (to cite the title of Marjorie Wallace's 1983 book about a pair of British criminal sisters), Christine and Léa Papin aspired to be both, and those aspirations fused in their notorious crime. They may have been convicted, but their motive remains a mystery that's a matter of degree.

'Murderous Maids' opens Fri/31 at the Castro Theatre, S.F. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times.