There may be those who would describe this as Rules Of The Game Lite dealing as it does with the mores of French society in the 1930s but one crucial difference is that Renoir made his film AT THE TIME whereas Bunuel was working a quarter of a century later. It's never really explained - unless, of course, I missed an explanation - why an intelligent, sophisticated Parisienne Celestine (Jeanne Moreau) would choose to bury herself in the French countryside in a menial position. Whatever the reason the fact that she does so gives Bunuel the chance to take his customary jaundiced view of the bourgeois household that serves as a microcosm for France as a whole and the world at large. The household is like a fruitcakes convention boasting a frigid wife, a priapic husband a fetishist grandfather and a brutal predator/murderer gamekeeper/handyman. Symbols abound not least the snails suckling on the bare legs of the murdered child, followed closely by the garbage thrown consistently into the grounds of the house by a retired army officer and academics and pseuds could get hours of mileage out of that one given the Petain/Vichy government waiting in the wings to dish up garbage by the plateful to a humbled nation. Moreau, as is to be expected, turns in a fine performance as do all the principals but I doubt if even the most devoted Bunuel buffs would want to return to it again and again.
Review of Diary of a Chambermaid
