I am surprised that the film has been often mentioned as Bunuel's minor film or even the closest to failure he'd come. I found it excellent - dark and cynical, funny and thought provoking. It's got everything I love Bunuel's films for sinister atmosphere, darker than dark humor, the strange characters living lives of sexual, religious, and social repressions. Jeanne Moreau, one of the greatest actresses France ever produced, as a titular chambermaid, Celestine adds to the film's many pleasures. Bunuel and his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière have transported the Octave Mirbeau's novel from the 19th century to the 1930s the epoch of Bunuel's first sojourn in France where he made his first two films. Celestine, a sexy and cool Parisian takes a job as a chambermaid to a bourgeois, provincial family with enough skeletons in the closet for a small cemetery. The irritable and arrogant wife is frigid, her husband (hilarious turn by Michel Piccoli) chases anything in skirt and her nice and well mannered father is a shoe-fetishist. There is also a neighbor, an ex-officer who hates Monteils and loves damaging and breaking his neighbors' things and property.
"Diary of a Chambermaid" (among many things) was able to show the absolute evil on the raise in the character of Joseph, the farm-laborer, who is sexually attracted to Celestine, a cruel, cold-blooded rapist-murderer and the fascist in such subtle yet scary way that Bertolucci should have watched and studied it for his "1900".
"Diary of a Chambermaid" (among many things) was able to show the absolute evil on the raise in the character of Joseph, the farm-laborer, who is sexually attracted to Celestine, a cruel, cold-blooded rapist-murderer and the fascist in such subtle yet scary way that Bertolucci should have watched and studied it for his "1900".