Les abysses

Story based on an actual case in France that inspired Jean Genet to write The Maids.
Two sisters are employed as servants in the home of Monsieur, Madame and their daughter Elizabeth. Gradually the maids rebel against their repression until in a terrible outburst they exact a violent revenge on their masters.

Michele and Marie-Louise, the two young sisters at the centre of the drama, are presented as deranged from the first moment we see them. Although we pity their circumstances, we fear more for their unlucky masters than we do for the odd siblings. The strange girls contrive to torment the householders in small ways at first - tearing down bits of wallpaper and breaking roof tiles. But confrontation starts soon after wards when the maids are not scared to answer back to their initially bemused employers. The young daughter of the house treats Marie-Louise with kindness, but this is by turns welcomed or ridiculed. Eventually the violence escalates out of control as feelings are given furious expression and all the individuals apply extraordinary measures of mental and physical cruelty upon each other. Exceedingly violent for the time.

As far as lesbianism is concerned, in real life the sisters were involved in a fully sexual incestuous relationship but we see little evidence of that here. Instead there is just the odd physical embrace and the merest hint of something more.