Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1946, jean renoir, the diary of a chambermaid
Director: Jean Renoir
Often overshadowed by Luis Buñuel’s later, sexier adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel The Diary of a Chambermaid, Jean Renoir’s interpretation was his penultimate Hollywood film, and it perhaps most closely resembles the themes that he addressed in his French work. Former Mrs. Charlie Chaplin Paulette Goddard plays Celestine, a young chambermaid who takes up her new post at the estate of the Lanlaire family. The matriarch of the household, Mrs. Lanlaire, exerts total control over both the servants of the mansion and her own husband, and through Celestine’s charms she wishes to seduce the son who ran away from her into staying at home once again. While the perversity of Buñuel’s version was closer to the novel – which was highly erotic on the page – Renoir choses to focus on the relationships between employers and servants in the generation following the French Revolution. Mrs. Lanlaire represents a product of the pre-Republic era – with the mass of silver she possesses suggesting that she holds onto the status that her family once held – and, in the film’s climax, Celestine redistributes the Lanlaire’s riches with the lowly townsfolk in an act of revolutionary socialism. The picture is wholly unique, with shifting tones and inventive juxtapositions – a murder taking place concurrently with an independence celebration, for example – and, while not often cited among Renoir’s best work, it is a fitting companion piece to The Rules of the Game.
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