THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID
(The Toronto International Film Festival (or TIFF) ran September 10-20 and HtN had boots on the ground covering all the best indie films they have to offer. Check out Clara Cuccaro’s The Diary of a Chambermaid movie review from the fest! Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Radu Jude’s newest film The Diary of a Chambermaid is not a faithful adaptation of the eponymous novel by Octave Mirbeau or the play Le journal d’une femme de Chambre, written by André de Lorde, or the Jean Renoir film or the Luis Bunuel version after that. Instead, this 21st century reimagination is centered on the life of a young Romanian woman Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu) working as a housekeeper and au pair to a well-off Bordeaux couple, Pierre (Vincent Macaigne) and Marguerite Donnadieu (Mélanie Thierry) in Bordeaux. Far away from her family and loved ones, she struggles with poverty and being far from her daughter, who she frequently FaceTimes, in this black comedy that functions as a deceptively sad retelling of a century old satire.
Shot in chapters spanning from September 23rd through late December, each vignette is essentially a day in the life of Gianina. She takes care of the French family’s young son, telling him Romanian folktales while her daughter lives with her grandmother back home. Gianina sends money to Romania and promises she’ll return for Christmas, but her optimism is a ruse meant to pacify her daughter’s sadness. Gianina’s life in Bordeaux is bleak. She sleeps in a cramped storage room, eats canned tuna, and spends her days cleaning the opulent Bordeaux apartment. She speaks fluent French, but the divide between Eastern and Western Europe lingers, turning Gianina into a spokesperson for a cultural gap she never asked to represent. She manages to avoid most conversations about her post-Soviet roots, but Pierre, a caricature of modern bourgeois French society with his condescending, yet performatively progressive personality, manages to bring her into the fold whenever possible. When Gianina makes Thai soup for dinner, he asks her if she put something special in, like “a dash of Romania.”
On her days off, Gianina sends videos to her daughter in the French city almost as if she was making a home movie with a camcorder. Jude weaves this smart phone footage into the film, mixing mediums similarly to what he did with Lucian Bratu’s 1981 Angela Moves On in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, but this personal footage is heartbreaking. Unlike his previous film, where intertextuality creates a generational distance between communist-era state cinema and the 21st century hyper-capitalist gig work that has come to dominate contemporary filmmaking, these smartphone videos zoom in on Gianina’s loneliness. They turn the screen into a conduit for the protagonist’s maternal yearning, showing the isolation that comes with emigration.
While the material of Jude’s film is often quite sad – think: domestic labor, economic precarity, and the quiet humiliations that Gianina endures at the hands of the oblivious Donnadieus – the director uses editing and humor to mask the tragedy within The Diary of a Chambermaid. Working alongside his long-time editor Cătălin Cristuțiu, Jude deploys sharp, jarring cuts that repeatedly jump from one day to another, often cutting off a thought midway through conversation like when the camera goes black after Gianina performs a sexually explicit monologue from de Lorde’s play.
The Diary of a Chambermaid is Jude’s first film not set in Eastern Europe, and yet it remains acutely attuned to the director’s Romanian roots while continuing his relentless critique of class hierarchy. Through a bilingual narrative centered on a Romanian migrant worker, Jude exposes the ongoing intra-European power dynamics between Western wealth and Eastern labor. By bringing his signature caustic humor and confrontational formal style to France, Jude remixes Mirbeau’s classic novel into an urgent parable of labor exploitation in Western Europe, but it’s also one of his softest, least pranksterish films that will make your heart ache.
