• _Diary of a Chambermaid_

    From septimus_millenicom@q.com@21:1/5 to All on Sun May 14 18:00:02 2017
    It goes without saying the the scenes where the Jessica Chastain
    character harbors Jewish refugees in _The Zookeeper's Wife_ eerily
    foreshadows U.S. citizens providing sanctuary for illegal immigrants
    in 2017. Similarly, Benoit Jacquot's _The Diary of a Chambermaid_
    would have been an astonishingly timely film were it released this
    year. The scathing portrait of the class warfare between the
    materialistic middle class, and the working stiffs left to fend for
    themselves in 1900, is also a lucid commentary on the rise of
    far-right seething rage and nationalism in the French and American
    political landscape.

    I haven't read Octave Mirbeau's novel, or seen the Jean Moreau-
    Luis Bunuel adaptation (unsurprisingly said to depicting foot-fetish
    and other surrealist touches). Jean Renoir's version is somewhat
    fresh in my mind. The titular chambermaid, played by Paulette
    Goddard, is a typical plucky, toomodern American heroine. The
    linearized screenplay, which omits the temporal jumps in the
    novel, seems to combine several of her employers in a single,
    composite household, with true love winning out in the end.

    Benoit Jacquot's vision seems to be much closer to Mirbeau's.
    Lea Seydoux is Celestine, cold, calculating, and cynical,
    her literacy, perfume, and pricey Sunday outfits clearly
    meant to announce her rebellion against the fate that puts
    her in subservient employment. The Parisian, exiled to the
    provinces, mercily mocks her less-than-sophisticated employers
    whenever they are barely out of earshot.

    Seydoux's inscrutable Celestine must be what Marie Antonette's
    romantic Reader Sidonie is like after her object of devotion
    betrays and disillusions her at the end of Jacquot's _Farewell
    My Queen_. Or maybe the fact that Celestine has nvever
    met anyone worth her love is what has killed the humanity
    in her? Yet that is not entirely true. Towards the end of
    this film she is tender and generous to her fellow maid who
    is impregnated by the employer. We also see in flashbacks
    someone who must be her true love -- a sickly rich boy
    who dies in her arms after his kind grandmother hires her
    to care for him. In tears, she runs away after the funeral;
    she has clearly been on a downward spiral ever since. These
    flashes of humanity make her final choice all the more
    startling.

    Benoit photographs the modest mansion just like the
    underground labyrinths of Versailles in the earlier film,
    emphasizing the confines of corridors and narrow doorways.
    There are plenty of over-the-shoulder shots, making us
    complicit in Celestine's cynicisms, but the camera is just
    as frequenty at a remove, taking in her visage at a remove,
    or even spying on her directly from above. (From the
    supplementary footage on the DVD, _Diary_ seems to be
    shot on old-fashioned film, not video.) But he
    manipulative Royal Court denizens in _Queen_ are positively
    civil compared to most of the petit bourgeois "job creators"
    ruthless brandishing their sense of entitlement. The
    madam of the house treats Celestine like a slave and
    is wary of Celestine seducing her lecherous husband,
    while the eccentric ex-army captain living nearby blatantly
    deceives his housekeeper Rose into thinking she is in
    his will. It makes you wonder what backstories, what
    losses hardened *these* people into such monsters. The
    end of the novel apparently leaves Celestine the owner
    of a bar, mistreating her own servants. Jacquot gives
    us a brief glimpse of this future but omits the detail
    about her impending tyranny. It is a curious choice for
    a filmmaker so fond of time-shifting epilogues.

    Celestine becomes intrigued by the much older man-servant
    Joseph. He seems a loyal worker and ignores her at first,
    but eventually reveals the extent of his self-serving revolt.
    He offers her a cold-hearted business deal -- rob their
    masters, run away, and open a bar serving sailors, where
    she might have to grant them sexual favors. He is also
    revealed to be a raging anti-semite. Servitude certainly
    does not breed virtue in _Diary_. (From the fact that
    Joseph is so secretive about his politics, should we
    inferred that the employers are liberal Republicans and
    Dreyfusards despite their odious attitudes towards the
    plight of their employees? They certainly don't go to
    church.) Moreover, Celestine has reasons to believe he
    has raped and gutted a 12-year-old in the forest.
    Nevertheless, she throws in her lot heart and soul, and
    seems genuinely sexually excited by this dangerous
    strong-silent type. Seydoux gives a brave, layered
    performance, making her character unlikeable and barely
    comprehensible, and nowhere is her acting as strong as
    in the final moments when she makes the her final choice,
    contempt and death in her eyes. One day the actress
    will be a great Lady Macbeth on screen or on stage.

    But in light of the recent U.S. elections, perhaps
    Celestine is not hard to understand at all. She is the
    face of every American woman who voted for the callous
    and self-serving Donald Trump/Steve Bannon camp. In France,
    the populist/ultra nationalist/anti-sematic alliance was
    routed in elections, but the middle-class which fancies
    itself liberal while callousness callously ignoring the
    plight of workers ruined by their disruption of the old
    economic order could really use _Diary of a Chambermaid_ as
    a mirror.

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