two chambermaids
hunter, cobbler, schoolboy, rapist-racist
by Douglas Messerli
Luis
Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière (adaptation and dialogue, based on a novel by
Octave Mirbeau), Luis
Buñuel (director) Le journal d’une femme
de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid)
/ 1964
Céléstine
(Jeanne Moreau), a beautiful chambermaid, has traveled from Paris—we can only
imagine the reasons for her leaving the city—to the country, where she will be
serving the Monteil household in their chateau. For this well-dressed city
girl, the country folk from the very beginning seem unfriendly and
unsophisticated, the family servant, Joseph (Georges Géret) who has come to
fetch her by phaeton hardly speaking a word to her, the wife (Françoise
Lugagne) asking her impolite questions and mostly lecturing the new chambermaid
about the preciousness of household objects. She is, we quickly perceive, a
woman who only occasionally suffers her husband’s sexual demands. From the
moment Céléstine meets Monsieur Monteil (Michel Piccoli) we perceive him as a
rather uncouth man, hunting down small animals and any female of the human
species that might cross his path; he has, evidently, gotten the last
chambermaid
pregnant, forcing Madame Monteil to pay damages.
Madame’s father (Jean Ozenne) is a genteel man who spends most of his time
leafing through pornographic postcards, quickly enlisting Céléstine to read to
him each evening while dressed in women’s boots of another era which he
caresses, polishes, and repairs. The family’s neighbor, Captain Mauger (Daniel
Ivernel) is a loud military man whose elderly servant shares his bed and dinner
table; hating the Monteil family, he spends much of his time tossing garbage
into their yard over the wall that separates their estates, acts which his
live-in surrogate wife describes as those of an overgrown schoolboy. The loyal
family retainer, Joseph, it turns out, is a rabid racist, spouting rightest and
anti-Semetic rhetoric, writing (with the help of the local sexton) fascist
texts. Céléstine, in short, has found herself immersed in a world of bourgeois
fetishists and perverts, the usual subjects of Buñuel’s works.
Much like the mysterious figure of
Pasolini’s movie, Teorema, of four years later, however, the young chambermaid
seems to offer each of these absurdly dreadful figures the perfect image of
their desires. Despite breaking the cover of an expensive lamp shortly after
her arrival, Céléstine even pleases the cow of a woman, Madame Monteil.
Throughout, in fact, the new chambermaid is able to please the ridiculous
figures of her new world with a slight smile, a sense of humor, and a
willingness to play along. She even becomes a kind of mother-protector figure
to the mysterious urchin, Claire, who wanders the local woods dressed in a kind
of “Little Red Riding Hood” outfit, gathering up snails and berries to trade to
the wealthy landowners for dinner.
When the elderly father-in-law, however,
is found dead in his bedroom, Céléstine determines to return to city life. At
the station she hears of the rape and murder of Claire and becomes suddenly
determined to return to the manor, suspecting Joseph, whom we know to be the
perpetrator of the dreadful act.
Her
return, however, baffles everyone, including the audience who must now, for the
first time, begin to suspect her motives. Particularly when she begins to
express a romantic interest in the brute Joseph, we can only wonder why she is
willing to go so far just for a sense of justice. Joseph is determined to open
a café in the military town of Cherbourg, and wants Céléstine as a wife and
sexual magnet to attract the military clientele. Her seductions, unfortunately,
appear for to be for naught, as he refuses to admit his crime. In revenge she
steals a small metal clip from the heel of the shoe, burying it near to where
the girl was killed. Discovered by the police, the object seems to implicate
him, and he is arrested. But upon his arrest, he proclaims that he was not
wearing that pair of shoes on the day of Claire’s death, and he is, quite
obviously freed, as we discover him in the last scene of the film in Cherbourg,
shouting rightist slogans, “Down with the Republic! Death to the Jew! Long live
Chiappe!—the Paris policeman who stopped Buñuel’s 1930 film L’Âge d’Or from being exhibited. So does
Buñuel, it appears, get his revenge.
In the penultimate scene, we witness
Céléstine in bed with Captain Mauger, as her new husband serves her breakfast.
So it becomes apparent this chambermaid has been equally willing to use her
powers to get what she wants. But what she truly wants remains in doubt, as we
witness her, sitting upon the bed, busily plotting her next move. We can only imagine
what that move might be—perhaps a return to the Chateau Monteil with the ouster
of the passive-aggressive Madame? Does she, like Buñuel simply seek revenge or
is she after something larger? In the
following decade with the rise of Nazi rule and the Holocaust, supported by
just such bourgeois folk and the blind eye of the Church, the world she served
was completely overturned. And even a former chambermaid might inherit the new
order. Buñuel’s most realistically presented film, accordingly, is as ambiguous
as all of his others.
Los Angeles,
March 11, 2012
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