Diary of a Chambermaid

Diary of a Chambermaid is a 1964 French–Italian drama film directed by Spanish-born filmmaker Luis Buñuel and starring Jeanne Moreau as a Parisian chambermaid who uses her body and wiles to navigate the perversion, corruption, and violence she encounters at the provincial estate where she goes to work. Though highly satirical and reflective of his typical anti-bourgeois sentiments, it is one of Buñuel's more realistic films, and generally avoids the outlandish surrealist imagery and far-fetched plot twists found in many of his other works. The film was the first screenwriting collaboration between Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, who extensively reworked the 1900 novel of the same name by Octave Mirbeau. Buñuel and Carrière would go on to collaborate on Belle de Jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Plot In France in the early 1930s, Célestine, a stylish and attractive young chambermaid from Paris, arrives at a provincial estate and joins a household staff that includes a cook, a timid maid named Marianne, and Joseph, the groom, who spends his evenings writing nationalisic, anti-Semitic leaflets with a friend. Célestine was primarily hired to work for the elderly Monsieur Rabour, who insists on calling her Marie, which is the name he has used for all of his chambermaids, and likes to touch her leg while she reads to him and watch as she walks around wearing certain shoes. She seems happy enough to oblige him, however, and he defends Célestine from his daughter, Madame Monteil, when she breaks a lamp. Madame Monteil runs the household and is very particular about how things are done. She and her husband are not physically intimate due to her dyspareunia, a problem with which the local priest has not been helpful, and Monsieur Monteil copes by expending his energy hunting small game in the surrounding woods and pursuing any woman who is nearby, including the former chambermaid, though Célestine playfully manages to keep him at arm's length. Monsieur Monteil is also feuding with a neighbor, the retired Captain Mauger, who throws his garbage onto Rabour's property to get back at Monteil for hypocritically spreading rumors about his relationship with his own housekeeper, Rose. One day, Rabour is found dead in his bed, clutching the pair of boots he had most recently had Célestine wear for him.