However even here it is hard to gauge from their high-flown dialogue

However, even here, it is hard to gauge from their high-flown dialogue (“It’s very homogenous: nobody stands out,” Mme L says of the performance), whether we are supposed to see them as pretentious or cultured. Certainly, they are considerate employers, even if Jacqueline Bisset’s superb mistress of the house is too chic-ly busy to notice much that goes on around her. If the movie has a message, it’s that the fault lies not in masters or serfs, but in the society that fosters such divisions The rich’s succour only exacerbates the wounds of the poor. In one of the most memorable scenes, they watch television, arms around each other’s shoulders, joined into one brooding beast.Some may view the movie as an attack on the bourgeoisie, as represented by the family Bonnaire works for. Here their peculiar brands of off-centre beauty – Bonnaire all gaunt intensity; Huppert wispy distraction – meet and meld. Her short, trim figure and her trousers make her seem girlish.

The only real worry is in the flustered way she clears a tray of glasses, betraying more madness than method.Huppert’s clerk is a much more obviously troubling character: sullen, abusive, atrabilious. Both Bonnaire and Huppert have always had a coldness in their acting, equally well suited to playing the transcendent and the transgressive. It is her pale, tense presence that carries the film, whose first section Huppert doesn’t appear in. “I would have noticed if she were hideous,” Bisset tells her family when she first employs Bonnaire. And it is true there is nothing outwardly alarming about Bonnaire: just a hint of pique in her quietness, maybe, a flutter of neurosis in her efficiency. They are not unhappy, just detached.Isabelle Huppert, last Saturday night, won the French Cesar award for best actress.

Fine though Huppert is, it should have gone to Bonnaire (also nominated). They collect discarded clothes for the local church, though even their charity hints at something sinister, disturbed. These weird soul sisters are linked by an odd closure of character; the world proceeds unnoticed by their tight, focused minds. If she is diffident, even defensive, it may be only that she is desperate for her employers not to know that she is illiterate.