Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis Bunuel, 1964)

 

Diary of a Chambermaid is yet another mesmerizingly well-controlled, implication-heavy Luis Bunuel masterpiece, and one of his most underrated works. Celestine (the ideal Jeanne Moreau) comes from Paris to take the titular job in the provinces, almost immediately pegging the woman of the house as a “cow,” and rapidly becoming an object of desire for almost every male in sight, the nature of those desires varying from an old man’s foot fetish to a co-employee’s plan of making her a partner in a business venture; she fairly rapidly quits, but then changes her mind after the brutal murder of a little girl of whom she was fond. The film evidences throughout Bunuel’s uncanny facility to electrify the cinematic space by heightening our sense of objects and relations, and is full of bitingly concise character studies; for instance, the husband (Michel Piccoli) is increasingly exposed as a desperate husk, all financial resources controlled by his wife, desperately searching for validation (when he finally gives up on Celestine and turns his attention to another, less self-assured servant, the poor woman’s quiet tears devastatingly drive home his calculating cruelty). Celestine ultimately finds a way to ascend within the local bourgeoisie, but then the final scene provides a classic Bunuelian swerve away from the main narrative, putting her machinations in vicious perspective: individual fortunes may rise and fall, but history meanwhile marches on, and the lascivious pleasure on one character’s face in the closing moments may be the film’s scariest image, seeming to look ahead to our own age of narcissistic strong men. For whatever reason, the film isn’t typically included in a summary of Bunuel’s greatest films (which admittedly is some pretty crowded territory), but it’s suffused in his unique mixture of ruthless elegance and cinematic grace, allowing us to cross off familiar Bunuelian targets while remaining constantly surprising, even startling.