Luis Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid places a stone-faced Jeanne Moreau in a country house filled with perverts and watches as she drops her moral standards to inconceivable lows. To Moreau's chambermaid, it's better to suppress loathing, keep things neat and support the status quo, even in the face of the worst atrocities in human history, than to take a stand and risk repercussions.
The film begins as a typical Bunuel tale of quirky perverts (Jean Ozenne's foot fetishist, Francoise Lugagne's coldly domineering lady of the house) with a blank at its center, Jeanne Moreau's oblique, vaguely disdainful chambermaid. The cinematography adds to our sense of Moreau's opacity by avoiding closeups of her for the entire film. As Moreau indulges her perverted employers in the interest of self-preservation and personal gain, Bunuel throws successively greater moral hurdles in front of her, culminating in the murder of a child, and she stoops to accept each one.
If you think that overlooking a brutal child murderer is the worst Moreau can do, just wait - the hulking, monstrous Georges Geret's reflexive anti-Semitism, hinted at in earlier dialogue, snaps into focus in the film's final scenes, which directly correlate Moreau's willingness to lower her standards with France's surrender to the genocidal Nazis in World War II.
A chilling and brutal - if emotionally distant - sermon, part anguished howl and part self-satisfied wink, the film is one of Bunuel's very best.
The film begins as a typical Bunuel tale of quirky perverts (Jean Ozenne's foot fetishist, Francoise Lugagne's coldly domineering lady of the house) with a blank at its center, Jeanne Moreau's oblique, vaguely disdainful chambermaid. The cinematography adds to our sense of Moreau's opacity by avoiding closeups of her for the entire film. As Moreau indulges her perverted employers in the interest of self-preservation and personal gain, Bunuel throws successively greater moral hurdles in front of her, culminating in the murder of a child, and she stoops to accept each one.
If you think that overlooking a brutal child murderer is the worst Moreau can do, just wait - the hulking, monstrous Georges Geret's reflexive anti-Semitism, hinted at in earlier dialogue, snaps into focus in the film's final scenes, which directly correlate Moreau's willingness to lower her standards with France's surrender to the genocidal Nazis in World War II.
A chilling and brutal - if emotionally distant - sermon, part anguished howl and part self-satisfied wink, the film is one of Bunuel's very best.