In the course of an interview with Isabelle Huppert, Nick James observes that her humour has been somewhat overlooked: ‘One of the things that attaches itself to you is the idea that you play a lot of cool characters who are quite intellectual, but I also see you in many comedy roles.’ Critics tend to associate Huppert, Ginette Vincendeau points out, with ‘the cerebral cachet of auteur cinema’. But it is precisely this conflation of auteur cinema's intellectual aura with art cinema's characters that Huppert rejects:

This insistence comes up more than once: ‘Even in the ‘The Piano Teacher,’’ she states, ‘there are a few moments where it's very, very funny … if you don't put this sense of humour in films, you don't have cinema … it's up to the actor to extract the potential of a line to be funny. I think that's really my contribution.’ In the spirit of Huppert's refusal to align the comedic with the lighter genres and her remarkable suggestion that the essence of both cinema and her own acting might ultimately be comedy, I ask how employing the lens of comedy to analyse one of Huppert's most violent roles, Jeanne, the postmistress in Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995), impacts our understanding of the film.

Sometimes described as Chabrol's greatest film, La Cérémonie is an adaptation of Ruth Rendell's 1977 novel, A Judgement in Stone, already adapted for the screen in 1986 as The Housekeeper by the Iraqi filmmaker Ousama Rawi (who also advised on La Cérémonie).