Murderous Maids

After Genet's The Maids and Nancy Meckler's Sister My Sister, another take on the Papin sisters, convent girls turned domestic servants who began an incestuous affair and then bludgeoned their employers to death in 1930s Lyons. Denis downplays the sensationalism, attempting instead to piece together the historical and psychological circumstances behind the affair, with particular emphasis on the vehement antipathy felt by the elder sister Christine (Testud) for her mother. Convincingly played, but some way short of revelatory. (From the novel by Paulette Houdyer.