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The Diary of a Chambermaid
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Take No Prisoners
The Diary of a
Chambermaid occurs at a curious and underestimated moment in Luis Buñuel’s long career. Along with the short Simon of the Desert (1965) that followed
it, it is usually regarded as part of a lull period between The Exterminating Angel (1962) on one
side and Belle de jour (1967) on the other. What the
former film is taken as capping-off in a Spanish-language idiom, and the latter
film credited with relaunching in a sleek, French
context, is (of course) Buñuelian Surrealism.
This
is the Buñuel with whom the majority of us are most comfortable: shocking or
beguiling visions, zany humour, heady satire – with a leaning either towards shabby neo-realism in black-and-white
(Spanish-language) or glamorous European settings and stars in colour (Catherine Deneuve, Bulle Ogier, Pierre Clémenti …).
The Diary of a
Chambermaid has some splendid image-shocks (the unforgettable apparition of snails on the
leg of a raped and murdered young girl, as brutal an evocation of Little Red
Riding Hood in a malign forest as Philippe Grandrieux would later propose in Sombre [1997];
an off-screen rifle blasting a sweet butterfly on a flower), a good deal of
satirical comedy of bourgeois manners, and the duo of Jeanne Moreau and Michel Piccoli.
But
it is also, deliberately, a downer: dismissed as old-fashioned naturalism by
many critics of the day, and imposing before us a uniformly grey bleakness. Buñuel’s
Swiss champion Freddy Buache rightly acclaimed it in
his 1970 book The Cinema of Luis Buñuel as “intentionally stark” and carrying “a nasty direct punch”. (1)
One
immediate sign of this – so easily missed, still today, by even sophisticated
viewers – assumes its fully contagious force once you become aware of it: even
more radically than Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds from the
previous year of 1963, The Diary of a
Chambermaid is a film utterly without musical accompaniment – a strategy that
pokes a huge hole in our usual, unconscious processing as viewers-listeners of
the dramatic, cinematic texture of events.
One
way to understand the film’s tone – quite unique in the director’s career, but
taken up again and differently at a more opportune career moment in the
masterful Tristana of 1970 – is to grasp the project as, in fact, post-Surrealist.
The
source material, Octave Mirbeau’s novel (presented in
first-person diary form, and quickly translated around the world at the turn of
the 20th century), was a passion of Buñuel’s young-adult reading life in the
mid 1920s, alongside (as Diary’s
co-screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, tells us) Pierre Louÿs and Joris-Karl Huysmans
– and to this taste he remained fanatically faithful, managing to nurture
adaptation projects from all three authors, realising two of them (this, and That Obscure
Object of Desire in 1977).
But
1964 – with Buñuel (never forget this) already 64 – was a long way from both
the young Luis’ 1925 and Mirbeau’s 1900. There is, if
not exactly a disenchantment with Surrealism evident in the finished film, at
least a sense that the movement has long been diffused and defused, become part
of a bland mainstream (hence the insertion of repeated amour fou declarations into the pathetic
mouth of Piccoli’s character Monteil).
The
film’s timing, after four glorious years of the Nouvelle Vague (about to fizzle
out in France, but just assuming its belated status as legend in many other
places), did it no favours at the box-office, but
seems to register an indirect, coded message: although Buñuel was accused of
laboriously settling accounts with matters no longer relevant to the ‘60s (such
as the rise of the ultra-right, anti-Semitic movements of the ‘20s, in league
with Church, State and Military), his work offered a distorted, unflattering
reflection to a national present that, in its fascination with modernist style,
managed to turn its back on virtually any representation of the Algerian
crisis.
Early
on, the film engineers a brilliant twist, one that must have been subtly
disconcerting to many Buñuel fans, then as now. We begin – via the handy,
not-too-problematic identification-figure of Céléstine (Moreau) – with the bourgeois comedy of manners: repression (especially in the
ever-itchy form of sexual frustration), absurd regulation (Buñuel lingers on
every detail of meal times, bathroom preparations for bedtime, clothing,
sitting, playing parlour games …), everyday power
struggles (a preview of Fassbinder), and (eventually) the evidence of every
kind of perversion (especially when randy Monteil ultimately decides to leave aside his taste for beautiful young servants and
take whomever is female, on two legs, and able to be bullied into submission).
But
then, when we move “downstairs” in terms of the classic hierarchy of
class-based melodrama, we find nothing that would be, by contrast, life-affirming
or positive (like the all-singing-dancing-loving servant class below deck in James
Cameron’s Titanic [1997]). No: downstairs is where we see the
rise of a New Right in its ugliest manifestation, especially embodied in the
figure of Joseph (Georges Géret).
So
there is no positive pole in the diagram of this story (which is drawn, à la Bertolt Brecht,
via the hyprocrisies of the characters and the graded
patterns of comparison-association they form), no one escapes the film’s
corrosive excoriation – save for, perhaps, the ethically motivated Céléstine, the wise outsider from Paris, less conniving and
upwardly-climbing than in Mirbeau, but nonetheless morally
ambiguous at key moments … especially when she is trying to bed a succession of
guys useful to her private, secret scheme.
Buache also called The Diary of a Chambermaid “extremely well-balanced”. (2) He’s
right: at exactly its mid-way point, there is a superb concatenation of three
key events. Old man Rabour (Jean Ozenne)
dies, presumably from an excess of fetishistic pleasure; the child Claire
(Dominique Sauvage) is murdered; and Céléstine – looping the story and the contours of its
closed world exactly – returns to the same train station she emerged from at
the start, in order to leave town. But the bad news about Claire hooks her, and
she takes herself back into the household fray, this time with a plan (to
seduce Joseph and elicit a confession from him): from this point, the narrative
escalates, ever so gradually, in its pace, tension and “moves”, and the
accumulation-repetition (upon which Buñuel’s work frequently rests) shifts into
a higher gear. It is a true lesson in narrative film construction.
Let
us return to an interesting word: naturalism.
Not as an aesthetic style – for Buñuel’s so-called transparency or simplicity
in the means of his staging and cutting is every bit as complex and cagey as
Fritz Lang’s, and uses a similar syntax of reframings and body-choreography – but as a literary, cultural and philosophical heritage.
In the eighth chapter of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze yokes Buñuel to that Zolaesque tradition most popularly embodied in film history
by Erich von Stroheim: all humans are animals, subject to their basest drives,
and in that way irredeemably “stupid” (in the philosophical sense!), taking
whatever fragile order they have managed to erect around them down into the
entropic depths of degradation and decay.
This
is, essentially, Buñuel’s Weltanschauung in The Diary of a Chambermaid: there
is no Utopian moment of revolution, reform or righteous justice; the action
follows the grim, inexorable logic of what Deleuze calls “the steepest slope”. (3)
Hence the very particular inflection that this film gives
to its presentation of fetishism, so often (indeed, usually) a source of erotic
celebration in Buñuel, from L’age d’or and El (1953) through to the final French productions. But fetishism is not
really the source of pleasure here, merely the sign of
a social perversion of the drives, a shriveled-up rerouting of desires that
only long ago (in the Surrealist heyday?) could have exploded in their natural
state out of the cocoon of paper-thin repression.
Here,
by contrast, repression-frustration smothers all, and everything
in its net festers (hence Nature itself reduced to the icon-level of slimy
snails). And also, more generally within the naturalist line Deleuze sketches, the emphasis on passing time, ageing,
“all the cruelty of Chronos”, (4) especially in
comparison with the innocent beauty of a child, or the porcelain good looks of
Jeanne Moreau: the signs of time, what it does to bodies and selves, are
uniformly disgusting. (Jean Renoir too – a filmmaker whom Deleuze notes was often tempted by naturalism – made use of this same, pointed contrast
in his very different 1946 rendering of Mirbeau’s book.)
The
ending of Buñuel’s film, in this light, is perfectly naturalist: with Céléstine’s revenge plan, at the last moment, thwarted by
the network of right-wing buddy privilege, Buñuel releases the story to the noisy
street and its ugly crowds, with an unimprisoned Joseph now the shopkeeper he always dreamt of being, and with a substitute-Céléstine on his arm – and then the dark, brooding sky filling
with lightning above … a sole Expressionist touch in this otherwise resolutely on-the-ground,
disquieting movie. (5)
MORE Buñuel: Un Chien andalou, Abismos de pasión, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
1.
Freddy Buache (trans. Peter Graham), The Cinema of Luis Buñuel (London: The Tantivy Press/New York: A.S. Barnes
& Co., 1973; original Swiss edition 1970), p. 140.
back
2.
Ibid.
3.
Gilles Deleuze (trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam), Cinema 1:
The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.
124.
4.
Ibid.
5.
This review distills points I make in greater detail on the feature-length
audio commentary accompanying The Diary
of a Chambermaid for its Australian DVD release (Madman, 2010).
© Adrian Martin July 2010 |
