DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID Movie Review

Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre
Il Diario di una Cameriera

Octave Mirbeau's novel about bourgeois decadence in the face of budding fascism was originally filmed in Hollywood in 1946 by Jean Renoir, but it was an unhappy clash of cultures that resulted in an amiable but negligible mess of a film. This savagely witty remake, made in France in 1964 by Luis Buñuel, sets the story in 1928. Célestine (Jeanne Moreau at her best) is the scheming, irresistible housekeeper who climbs up the social ladder by using the political and sexual fantasies of everyone in her well-to-do employer's household as the rungs on which she steps. Both deeply funny and genuinely appalling, Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid is a sobering and boldly witty vision of a self-deluded, refined society hungrily feeding on itself. With Georges Geret, Michel Piccoli, and longtime Buñuel writing collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière.

NEXT STOP … Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), L'Age d'Or, Viridiana

1964 97m/C FR Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Georges Geret, Francoise Lugagne, Daniel Ivernel; D: Luis Bunuel; W: Luis Bunuel, Jean-Claude Carriere; C: Roger Fellous.VHS, LV IME, XVC