merenabe
Just as the mystery of Jack the Ripper continues to grip the English imagination, the case of the Papin sisters of Le Mans two maids who, in 1933, brutally slaughtered their employer and her daughter holds a peculiar sway over the French. Jean Genet used the ghastly events as the basis for his celebrated one-act play "The Maids," while the cream of France's intelligentsia, from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Jacques Lacan, have searched for answers to the questions raised by the Papins' bizarre crime. Jean-Pierre Denis's scorching film one of the most harrowing true-crime dramas since IN COLD BLOOD is the latest treatment of the subject, and it's one of the most thorough. Based on the minutes of the sensational trial, select...