Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1964)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

By the early 1960s, the golden age of Mexican cinema was all but over, and Luis Buñuel, its leading light, would soon be heading off to pastures new. In 1963, the legendary filmmaker was back in his home country of Spain, where he had a meeting with the producer Serge Silberman that was to decide the course of his future career.  An admirer of Buñuel's Mexican work, Silberman persuaded him to attempt an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, a novel that Buñuel had read frequently since his student days.  The book had already been adapted by Jean Renoir during his self-imposed exile in Hollywood, as The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), with Paulette Goddard playing the main character of the social climbing maid Célestine.

Buñuel was keen to make the film in Mexico, with Silvia Pinal, the star of his earlier Viridiana (1961), in the lead role, but Silberman persuaded him to make it in France.  And so began Buñuel's second French period, more than thirty years after his last French film, L'Âge d'or (1930).  It was also the start of the final (many would argue greatest) phase of his career and the beginning of his 19-year-long collaboration with the writer Jean-Claude Carrière.  The two men had a shared interest in entomology and struck up an immediate friendship when they met at Cannes.  Carrière would work with Buñuel on the scripts for all of his subsequent films and also help him to complete his celebrated autobiography My Last Sigh.  An actor as well as a writer, Carrière appeared on screen in two of Buñuel's films: Le Journal d'une femme de chambre and La voie lactée (1969).

Buñuel's take on Mirbeau's novel is markedly different from Renoir's.  In contrast to Renoir's light-hearted class war comedy, Buñuel delivers his most scathing assault on the bourgeoisie, his favourite satirical target.  Le Journal d'une femme de chambre is among the bleakest and most naturalistic of Buñuel's films, containing none of his trademark surrealism and little of his ironic humour.  The film can be seen as a continuation of his previous anti-bourgeois piece El Angel exterminador (1962) and a precursor to his subsequent films Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) and Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974), which cover the same territory but in a far more humorous and idiosyncratic vein.

In typically Buñuelian fashion, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre shows a rigid class structure in which the social order is as well-defined and immutable as that exhibited by the insect kingdom.  The only character in the film who is not bound by social constraints, and who can therefore go where she pleases, is the self-consciously sexy housemaid Céléstine, played to perfection by Jeanne Moreau, the living embodiment of female emancipation.   The fluidity of the camerawork stresses both the character's independence and the hideously static nature of the world she has entered.  Céléstine is the only character in the film who is free to choose her destiny - everyone else appears to be frozen in aspic, happy in their little cages like exhibits in a zoo.

And what exhibits.  Buñuel presents us with his weirdest menagerie yet.  There is the frigid bourgeois wife who is more interested in preserving her household ornaments than her marriage.  There is her sexually frustrated husband who is constantly chasing after servant girls.  There is the reclusive patriarch with a bizarre shoe fetish and the annoying neighbour, a proud military man, who keeps lobbing rubbish over the garden fence.  Finally, there is Joseph, the anti-Semitic gamekeeper who, despite his habit of spouting racial hatred and murdering innocent young girls, is far more amiable than his freeze-dried employers.  It isn't long before Céléstine has got the measure of this odd assortment of humanity and begins using them as rungs in her spectacular social ascent.

Eerily claustrophobic, the film feels like a darkly Buñuelian reinterpretation of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice (Céléstine) forces her way into a hermetically sealed hidden world over which she sets out, quite deliberately, to make herself queen.  In contrast to Mirbeau's book, where the entire story is related to us by Céléstine herself (through her diary), the Céléstine in Buñuel's film is resolutely opaque.  She lets us into her thoughts on only one occasion (when she says the word 'Salaud' to herself after Joseph's arrest); for the rest of the film, she is a closed book.  Yet it is clear to us right from the outset what her ultimate goal is.

Céléstine's gradual assimilation into the bourgeois milieu is made apparent to us through the starkest of visual metaphors: the body of the murdered young girl in the forest.  Just as nature has claimed back the girl's body (shown by the snails crawling over it), so the bourgeoisie has begun to absorb Céléstine, like some kind of vampire, drawing from her the vitality it needs to go on existing.  As is evident from the strained relationship between the husband and wife (for whom even a caress is considered indecent), the bourgeoisie cannot propagate itself in the conventional way, and so when one person dies, another must be pulled in from outside, assimiliated and reconditioned into the bourgeois way of living.

The Céléstine that we see at the end of the film is nothing like the carefree lively thing we saw at the beginning.  She has been completely taken over and must adhere to the rules of the bourgeoisie.  Now a prisoner in her own little cage, she has no choice but to repeat the same rituals, completely unaware of her transformation.   Meanwhile, outside this self-satisfied little menagerie, the world is gradually falling apart, with Fascist demonstrations heralding the beginning of the most turbulent period of the 20th century.  The bourgeois are blissfully unaware of these developments and carry on as they have always done, happily immured in their closed little world, like dancing automata in a music box.  They distract themselves with their favourite pursuits (shooting butterflies, throwing dice and counting their money), as oblivious to the storm that is breaking overhead as the insects in their garden.

Film Synopsis

In the early 1930s, a young woman named Célestine leaves Paris to take up the post of a house maid with the Monteils, a bourgeois family living in rural France.  Célestine's initial impression that privincial life is unbearably dull is soon disproved when she discovers that the Monteuils are barely on speaking terms, their father, Monsieur Rabour, has an obsessive shoe fetish, and their servant Joseph is an extreme right-ring activist.  After the death of Monsieur Rabour, Célestine decides to give up her job, but changes her mind after a little girl is raped and murdered.  Suspecting Joseph of the crime, she offers him sexual favours, whilst secretly looking for the evidence that will incriminate him...