Taking on a
novel that’s already been adapted by two of the greatest filmmakers of all time
should give any contemporary director pause, you would think. But Benoît
Jacquot shows no signs of intimidation in his “Diary of a Chambermaid,” which
he and his co-scenarist, Hélène Zimmer, adapted from Octave Mirbeau’s
anti-bourgeois novel of 1900.
The book
was adapted to the cinema in 1946 America, by the great French director Jean
Renoir. (The first film version was made in Russia in 1916.) Necessarily
inhibited by Hollywood censorship of the time, Renoir rendered a sort of antic
burlesque of the source material, a highly ironic tale of a chambermaid with
social-climbing aspirations who duels with her shifting concepts of integrity
as she makes her plays. Paulette Goddard essayed an unusually sassy Celestine.
In 1964, with Jeanne Moreau in the lead role, Luis Buñuel made a sardonic and
surreal vision. For this film, Jacquot, always a remarkably assured filmmaker
(his other pictures include wonderful ‘90s movies such as “A Single Girl,” “Seventh Heaven,”
and, more recently, “Farewell My Queen”) expands the source material’s contempt for middle-class hypocrisy into a
more expansive misanthropy. But because he (and, of course, his cast) makes his
people so engaging, the cynicism feels strangely embracing.
Léa Seydoux
(“Blue Is the Warmest Color,” “Spectre,” and also Jacquot’s “Farewell”) plays
Célestine here, and when we first see her, in conference with a Parisian
overseer who’s trying to place her in a good position, the character is sullen,
puffy-eyed. The sometimes abrupt flashback sequences, detailing incidents from
other job situations, give us a clear picture of why she’s fatigued, indeed
more than fatigued. Dispatched to the French countryside, she’s immediately
turned off by her new mistress, Madame Lanlaire (Clotilde Mollet). Madame starts going on about
all the precious things she’s got on her mantle and stops in the hallway to
ramble on about a clock, one that, if it needs repair, has to be sent to
London. “Do you send your cracked chamber pot to London, too?” Célestine asks,
barely under her breath. Monsieur Lanlaire (Hervé Pierre), a memorably bonkers shoe fetishist
in the Buñuel movie, is here just an ineffectual would-be letch. Monsieur
Joseph, the master of the stable, on the other hand, is a burnt-umber vision of
masculinity, played by contemporary French cinema’s default masculine
archetype, Vincent Lindon. Monsieur Joseph also turns out to be an avid
anti-Semite, one whose repellent views are all the more appalling for being
pronounced in quiet, even tones.
That
Célestine isn’t much bothered by this is a potent, disquieting reminder that a
taste for “bad boys” isn’t always an endearing quality. It’s hard to know,
though, just what Célestine’s motivations are. She directly conveys more of her
own point of view about 30 minutes into the film, when she is heard in voiceover,
going over how she might poison her employers, and ultimately rejecting the
idea. In the meantime, in a series of handsomely mounted and beautifully judged
scenes, the viewer is shown the rough absurdities of Célestine’s present, as in
a scene where she visits an eccentric neighbor and learns in a most unpleasant
way that he’s not someone to be teased about what he will or will not eat. Her
past, too, is unsettling. She is charged with looking after a young man with
tuberculosis, and naturally he falls in love with her, with predictably
disastrous but not in themselves predictable results.
It’s during
this sequence that Célestine has a line of dialogue that is the key to the
whole film. Criticizing her charge Georges (Vincent Lacoste, who here looks a
bit like a young Keith Gordon) for overexerting himself, she says “You enjoy
making yourself ill.” In this movie, that’s the nutshell definition of the
human condition. The anti-bourgeois indignation of Mirbeau’s vision is expanded
in this film, which can be read as expressing a nearly entirely dismissive
skepticism of progressive notions of “empowerment.” This will likely make it
unpopular in certain circles. But the immediate effect Jacquot achieves, with
quiet droll and some considerable dread, is bracing.