The Diary of a Chambermaid

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Hi Aki,

We watched The Diary of a Chambermaid tonight. Another Buñuel, from early in his second French period.

Story has Celestine, a Paris chambermaid, accept employment in a house in the country. There’s nothing to do there, everyone is provincial, the servants are nincompoops or brutes, the old master is a dotty shoe fetishist, the mistress, his daughter, is a stickler, uptight, who can’t stomach sex with her husband, her husband as a result is condemned to long walks in the woods hunting, or trying to seduce the chambermaid as he has every chambermaid before her. Celestine, however, will have nothing to do with him. Though the mistress at first doesn’t like Celestine at all (possibly because Celestine is pretty, and the mistress fears her husband will take up with Celestine) later on she warms to her (maybe because Celestine doesn’t sleep with husband). Celestine manages to get pretty much what she wants from all of them.

The first half plays out as a sly satire on the upper class, though the servants are no saints. The second half turns into a bit of a murder mystery or suspense film: A young girl whom Celestine was especially fond of, is found raped and butcherd in the woods, on the very night the old gentleman is found dead with Celestine’s boot in his mouth! Celestine is sure that Joseph, another servant, is responsible, because he is a sadist and a brute and a fascist as well. We are sure it’s Joseph as well, since we see him meet the girl in the woods, then run after her, and then a shot of the girl’s legs emerging bare from behind a bush, with two great snails crawling on them (probably the most unforgettable image of the film – in fact this whole sequence is strong, playing like something out of a folktale, Little Red Riding Hood gone dark).

Celestine proceeds to snoop on the man, goes into his rooms, even pretends to love him and sleeps with him, all the while trying to get him to confess to the murder. At last she frames him, and this has him arrested and charged. But since the only bit of evidence is the toe of one of his shoes that Celestine has put at the scene of the murder, the charges are dropped.

Celestine goes on to marry the retired army captain next door, and rescues the girl who’s bound to be the next victim of her former master. And Joseph goes on to have his café in Cherbourg, cheering the fascists as they march through the city.

There’s something that struck me as odd about the structure of the household, and looking up the plot of the 1891 novel from which it’s adapted, I see that there Celestine first had the old shoe fetishist as master, then when he died she moved on to serve the couple. The novel is a non-linear, more episolary novel, presented as though it is the actual diary of the girl Celestine R., filled with condemnations of French society in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, dirty with money, the rich the worst, the poor helplessly in the thrall of the rich, and yet little better morally. Octave Mirbeau, the author, seems to have been fulminating, but Buñuel and co-screenwriter Jean Carrière were lighter in tone, perhaps, more amused and bemused by the ridiculous spectacle we all make of ourselves. The feud between the household’s master and the neighboring army captain is pretty funny.

The film is shot in black and white, and well lighted; a handsome production in all, with an excellent cast, lots of period 1920s costumes, carts and horses and antique cars, and so on. One annoying thing is it is shot in widescreen anamorphic ‘Franscope’ and the lenses are not well shaped; figures at the edges of the screen are stretched quite thin, and wide angle lenses distort the middle of the shot during pans; a closeup on a snail in the little girl’s hand is quite disturbing – I’m not sure just what happened in the shot, as the camera booms back and the frame widens out, something happens – is it a quick change of lenses in the middle of the shot, or a change in lighting, or the breathing of the lens as a slight zoom is snuck in?

Jeanne Moreau is Celestine, and she’s quite good. It’s interesting this came to us on the same day as Susana, which also deals with a young pretty servant girl entering the household, immediately desired by all the men. Susana encourages and enflames this lust, Celestine seems not particularly to want it, and easily fends off the attractions she doesn’t desire, deftly handling everybody. This was part of the novel, it seems, as well: How the lower class can if they are intelligent and skillful, maneuver their ‘masters’ into doing what the servants want. One servant in the movie who isn’t so intelligent is Celestine’s successor as chambermaid: We see the master try all his old lines on her, and she just doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how to say no, and yet she can’t imagine leaving and losing the employment. She is on the verge of tears, and a few minutes later she is ordered into the barn where she will be raped by the master.

There’s little surrealism here, and apart from the old man’s shoe fetishism (which is also in the novel, but apparently Buñuel also liked women’s feet more than usual) and the army captain throwing garbage over the hedge into the master’s yard, everything proceeds quite realistically.

There is no music in the movie. Susana on the other hand was pumping with melodramatic music like a Warners 1940 melodrama, practically wall to wall. Buñuel didn’t have much control over Susana, which was a for-hire job; Chambermaid is much more under his control, and yet is quite restrained and ‘French’ if you will, and if I saw it without the credits I doubt if Buñuel would occur to me as the likely director.

(19 March 2009)