Diary of a Chambermaid

Jeanne Moreau acting her best, director Luis Bunuel at his most malevolently intelligent: who could ask more?

Something for everyone here. Camera-conscious film wonks, alert to Cinema History, will notice something new in this use of Cinemascope: it seems uniquely uninfluenced by Hollywood wide-screen, model of New Wave Americanophiles like Chabrol and Vadim. Bunuel's vision of provincial France seems rather an extension into modern times of the native Renoir tradition of lighting and composition.

Here's the action: maid Celestine (Moreau) arrives in Normandy from Paris, to work at a manor. Immediately begins a tableau of lives ruled and twisted by the sexual impulse. The lady of the manor is conspicuously frigid, her husband (brilliantly acted by Michel Piccoli) comically virile. "Watch out for that guv." Celestine is warned, "with him: one shot--POW!--a baby!"

Bunuel leads us along the borderline of bourgeois satire, in a vein as old as Moliere; but only briefly. Sadist Josef is an anti-Semite, and his violent Fascist explosions shatter the relatively calm surface of the satire. A visit from the cure begins as a mild lampoon of the clergy, but breaks all bounds when Madame seeks a little sex-education.

Suddenly, gratuitously, Josef rapes and murders a little neighbor girl. Celestine, having quit that day, is waiting for a train to Paris when she hears of the atrocity, mysterious to the populace but transparent to her intuition.

Just when the plot seems to be resolving into a detective story of evidence gathering, Celestine conceives an irresistable attraction to Josef and seduces him. In bed, she teases him: "Tell me it was you who killed little Claire." We lose confidence in her motives, though she later tries to frame Josef for the murder; he sounds plausible telling her "We're alike. You're just like me."

Bunuel's theme is the seductive power of Evil. Earlier, when Josef and a Fascist friend were composing anti-Semitic tracts, a witless scullery-maid unwittingly contributed a phrase, by voicing her opinion on a point of rhetoric. We are never sure how close to moral seduction our protagonist Celestine is, as she struggles in the currents of circumstance. We too feel seduced when Bunuel's devious camera involves our gaze in the seemingly innocuous--a butterfly on a window--then pulls back to show us our complicity in senseless violence--as the senile grandfather blasts it with a shotgun we were unwittingly sighting over.

This is a profound yet light-footed film, agile as the brightest comedy. It can be seen on many levels, but it should be seen.