_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.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)