Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel Diary of a Chambermaid has now been filmed four times, most notably via mirroring projects by two of the 20th century’s greatest auteurs. The first of these, directed in 1946 by Jean Renoir, was the product of a French expatriate doing a short tour in the Hollywood studio system; the other, released 18 years later, of a Spanish journeyman entering his most fertile creative period in France. Mirbeau’s core story, a ripe, torrid fable of decadent dissipation written during the Dreyfus affair, involves an upper-class household gripped with political, sexual and racial tensions, making it fertile ground for recreation, with slight tweaks made to suit the times. For the famously class-obsessed Renoir, America’s post-WWII interest in stomping on the ashes of the fascist conflagration offered a chance to surreptitiously critique the country’s growing fixation on rampant careerism, social climbing and adventurist wealth seeking, drawing out an implicit relationship between such economic corruption and parallel forms of political extremism, the elevation of self-interest above the good of society painted as intrinsically poisonous. For Buñuel, equally fixated on sex as a psychological and economic vector, this material provided the occasion to vividly detail the contact points between fascist hatred and personal perversion, the concealment of the latter creating the secretive conditions under which the former could flourish.
Benoît Jacquot doesn’t have the same cachet as either of these titans, but he’s no slouch either, especially when it comes to vibrantly depicting the intersection between sexual aggression, political power dynamics and female experience. Still, his version can’t help but feel like a second-tier take on this familiar story. It compares just as poorly to the veteran French director’s best work, particularly 1997’s Seventh Heaven and 2012’s Farewell My Queen, both similarly scorching psychosexual parables of lust as a method of control. In those films, however, there was a coherent connection between the concept of sex as a means of currency and a camouflaged pivot point in power relationships. Here the entire allegory is murky, further mystified by a detached style that does little to penetrate the psychology of its characters, or to construct a convincing metaphorical scaffolding, even as it attempts to draw a correlation between sexual subjugation and racist fear-mongering, seemingly inspired by France’s current political climate.
In this version, the title character of Celestine (Lea Seydoux) is a troublesome, reluctant domestic who just can’t seem to hold onto a job. Rebuked by her hiring agent for fouling up another assignment, she heads off to the country residence of the Lanlaires, where she’s confronted with all manners of dysfunction, most clearly represented by a trio of toxic male figures. The unnamed man of the house (Hervé Pierre) is a gropey piece of work, well-known for impregnating any woman who falls into his grasp. Joseph, the caretaker (Vincent Lindon), is a nasty, brutish anti-Semite who appears to spend all his time chopping, striding and glaring. Finally, as an example of an outwardly harmless but insidiously virulent figure, is the neighbor and resident eccentric known only as the Captain (Patrick D’Assumçao), an impish retired army officer who derives his greatest pleasure by throwing rocks through the windows of his neighbor’s greenhouse.
Cast alongside these three male figures is de facto boss (Clotilde Mollet, her character also never given a first name). Her embattled relationship with Celestine seems to stand as the central conflict of the film, and the crux of its consideration of women being treated as objects, although that clash is often undermined by the prominence of other characters, and the strain between portraying Mrs. Lanlaire as a complex individual and an absolute witch. Her status as the scorned companion to an endlessly philandering, inattentive husband does help explain her inherent cruelty, just as years of previous abuse, revealed in flashbacks, eventually illuminate Celestine’s sour attitude. This elucidates the static between them and gives purpose to otherwise puzzling scenes, like one early on where an officious railroad official reveals an ornate dildo hidden in Mrs. Lanlaire’s luggage, prompting scornful laughter from a crowd of onlookers.
This attention to the issues of masculine monstrousness, in an era during which women had few if any rights, finds its flashpoint in a subplot involving a raped and murdered young peasant girl, whom Celestine begins to suspect was killed by the vicious Vincent. As in other versions, there’s also some connection drawn between a society that permits and encourages hatred toward minorities, represented by the scurrilous activity of Vincent (who’s being paid by local Catholic Church officials to distribute anti-Jewish propaganda leaflets) and one that tolerates the murder of innocents. Yet while he has the freedom to be even kinkier than Buñuel and even more politically caustic than Renoir, who cloaked his dark message beneath a veneer of whimsical countrified caricatures, Jacquot instead ends up sandwiched somewhere between the two, with a stylish adaptation that adds little to these previous versions. There’s a lot going on in this update, but it’s hard to say what it all amounts to, resulting in a muddled, often impenetrable movie in which the tangled schemes of ambiguously motivated plotters are never convincingly unraveled.
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