In Le Mans in 1933, Christine and Léa Papin, sisters working together as maids, murdered and mutilated their mistress and her daughter. The apparently unmotivated crime has captivated the French imagination ever since, occasioning analyses and writings by Sartre, de Beauvoir and Lacan, and inspiring Genet’s The Maids. Denis revisits the incident by focussing on the lives of the two sisters from their early childhood through to their crime and incarceration. What emerges is a picture of intense mutual love and dependence feeding on the cruelty and indifference of the people beyond the sisters’ increasingly limited and isolated world. Christine, the elder, is put into a convent as a young girl when her parents split up. But instead of allowing her to become a nun as she wishes, her mother forces her into employment as a maid, taking her earnings until she reaches majority. Christine determines to save the much younger Léa from the same fate and battles their mother for Léa’s affection. When the two sisters get employment at the same house, they become inseparable, their deepening bond rendering them more vulnerable to social forces. Shot on location in Le Mans, the film, with its deep empathy for the doomed heroines, yields an austere, disturbing beauty

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