Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
Another of Luis Buñuel’s elegant outrages, a picture brimming with a tangible warm bathwater rage, Diary of a Chambermaid was Buñuel’s first collaboration with screenwriter Jean Claude-Carrière, who would go on to write or co-write all of the director’s late period French masterpieces, including Belle de jour, The Phantom of Liberty, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Of all those pictures, Diary is the least obviously strange and challenging, adhering to a more or less conventional narrative from minute one, in which we follow a train from Paris to a grand country house, to minute ninety-eight, where a fascist revolution is cheered as it gains prominence in a troubled country, all to the ignorance or encouragement (or both) of the majority of the characters, who are, typical to Buñuel, beholden to sex, money and general self-absorption over any and all else.
Our entry-way to said grand country house is Céléstine (Jeanne Moreau), a maid from Paris who, it is immediately apparent, is accustomed to nicer things than the typical help. Céléstine wears perfume, which arouses the suspicion of the shrewish lady of the house, Madame Monteil, who is, at the expense of relationships with her husband and her father, fanatically devoted to the pricey knick knacks that clutter every corner of the home. The economy with which Buñuel establishes the inner workings of the Monteil home is masterful: the Madame looks Céléstine’s clothes over and, sighing, tells her it’s obvious she’s from Paris. A moment later another servant tells her the same thing, only with palpable awe, the difference between the classes crystallized in two lines of dialogue.
And so the picture proceeds, in a series of sketches that trace the shifting dynamics of the Monteil household as informed by the powerful, aloof, self-contained new presence of Céléstine, who remains, for the entirety of Diary, a purposeful cipher, an enigma. As with Belle de jour (an even stronger picture, probably because it plays so readily to Buñuel’s amusements) the sexually potent woman is a measure of the skeletons and obsessions of all the other (primarily male) characters. Madame Monteil’s father (Jean Ozenne) is perhaps the most moving, and his notable scene with Céléstine could have just as easily occurred in Belle: the father asks Céléstine if he can call her Marie. She obliges. The father asks if she will put on a pair of little black boots. Céléstine again obliges, and the father watches in ecstatic longing as she walks around the room for him. The scene, as with many in Buñuel’s canon, is a marvel of tone: satirical, creepy, and heartbreaking in equal measures, supplying Ozenne with the most emotionally accessible role in the picture. The father is a member of the much maligned upper-crust who checked out long ago, enslaved by his fantasies. Ozenne’s character illustrates Buñuel’s brilliance and humanity: the filmmaker was never satisfied to score cheap points from one side of the room. Buñuel’s pictures, instead, have an empathy that deepens the pathos as well as the shock.
There are several other scenes in Diary of a Chambermaid that are just as wonderful and impossible to forget. Madame Monteil’s husband (a thuggish, fascinating Michel Piccoli), having given up on sleeping with Céléstine, and once again rebuffed by his frigid wife, sets his sights on a lowly laundry woman, Marianne (Muni). The woman, grasping Monteil’s intentions, allows herself to quickly cry, before being tugged away out of audience sight into a nearby barn. The moment has the rapt primal horror of a great silent film. So does the image of a murdered girl that happens late in the picture, and, on the most obvious level, embodies the price of the corruption and apathy that’s festering in the Monteil home. That may sound too cool, too academic, but the image of the girl’s legs: exposed, the snails she was collecting earlier crawling over the pale skin, is anything but.
These charged moments and images establish Diary of a Chambermaid to firmly belong amongst the other Buñuel pictures, and, if you’re unaccustomed with the man’s work, this may be the place to start. Diary provides the other pictures with context, a base for the filmmaker’s preoccupations and curiosities. All of the later Carrière collaborations are bolder, even more accomplished pictures, but that’s more a comment on the high stock of the Buñuel filmography than Diary’s merit. The picture has an atmosphere of dread; of defeat and unease unencumbered by boring directorial editorializing, that is rare in most (particularly American) films. Robert Altman’s work is an exception, and if you’re interested in a mainstream American picture that has that mood I’d check Altman’s The Gingerbread Man. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret also has this elusive light rot, and the ending, a terrifying triumph of evil amongst the common citizens’ preoccupation with banal things, is eerily similar to Diary’s.
And Diary of course also has Jeanne Moreau, a film legend who wields her gifts of beauty, intelligence, calculation and mystery to considerable effect for Buñuel. One glance at Moreau’s Céléstine explains why a weak or strong man might waste the world away attempting to possess her. Toward the end we think we may have figured Céléstine at least partially out, having heard of the little girl’s murder, she attempts to expose the killer by seducing the confession out of him and, later, even supplying evidence that didn’t actually exist. Céléstine’s concern is never explained, though perhaps she’s attempting to do something noble for the same reason that characters in many of Woody Allen’s later pictures do something monstrous, to see if the act can succeed, and be survived and tolerated. Buñuel’s answer is as cynical (though funnier) as Allen’s. Proven wrong, Céléstine retreats to her new good fortune, destined to one day be the old man with the strange boots.
★★★★
