elvircorhodzic DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID is a crime comedy, which on a surreal way connects a radical politics, corruption, violence, and sexual perversions. Mr. Buñuel is not making fun of some kind of tradition, he just points to the shocking background of a provincial town.Célestine is an ambitious and attractive maid, from Paris, who comes to work for a Normandy estate. Her hosts are crazed, violent and perverse. The elderly father is a harmless old fetishist, his daughter is a frigid and meticulous woman, while her husband can't keep his hands off the servants. Here are their servants and a neighbor, retired Army officer, who shares his bed with a chubby maid. Célestine must wisely choose men who surround her...The story is placed in the middle of the 1930s. A woman has completely disrupted relations and instincts between other protagonists in this film. It's kind of a surreal view on a provincial environment and the relation between a nationalism, petty bourgeois and religion.Mr. Buñuel has put a strange household in the correlation with the French social structure. Characterization is very good. Completely different characters fight, in a surreal atmosphere, to achieve their ambitions. However, the epilogue is more than realistic.Jeanne Moreau as Célestine is a smart and very capable woman. She pushes her temperament in the right direction. She has become an essential part in the lives of people and hostile environment that surrounds her. She waited patiently for the right opportunity to remove a "rotten tissue" and realize her ambition. Ms. Moreau offered very good performance.This is, perhaps a little unclear story, but it is an effective and fun experience.

William James Harper This movie is more rubbish from the perverted mind of Bunuel, who like most men of the left, is great a criticizing western society and the things that made it strong and workable but never offers solutions that might better it weak points. I am not one of these film buff idiots who thinks everything Bunuel did is brilliant and something to be revered. Frankly, this movie offers nothing. No humor, no real life characters, not even an interesting plot. Bunuel and Michael Moore are pretty much one and the same, propagandists who are more interested in spreading their gospel of Marx than in creating entertaining films to which most Americans can relate. With any luck, they will both be forgotten even the the pseudo-intellectuals who write glowing reviews on this site about every trite thing that their guys crank out. The general public has no use for this nonsense I am glad to say.

Claudio Carvalho In the 30's, the witty, literate and quite sophisticated chambermaid Céléstine (Jeanne Moreau) comes from Paris to work for the dysfunctional Monteil family in the country, more specifically for the fetishist on shoes and maniac for cleaning Monsieur Rabour (Jean Ozenne). His daughter and mistress of the house Madame Monteil (Françoise Lugagne) is a frigid and arrogant woman, and her husband, Monsieur Monteil (Michel Piccoli), is a hunter and also a wolf with their maids. Their fascist and rude worker Joseph (Georges Géret) feels a sexual attraction for Céléstine, but she repels him. Their neighbor, Captain Mauger (Daniel Ivernel), has a problem with the Monteils and dumps his garbage in their yard, but Céléstine talks to him and is motive of gossips. When Monsieur Rabour unexpectedly dies, Céléstine quits her job but while in the train station, she finds that the girl Claire was found raped and murdered by the police. Céléstine returns to her job convinced that Joseph killed the little girl and trying to find evidences against him."Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre" is a delightful movie of undefined genre – drama, black comedy, adventure? – where Luis Buñuel again exposes fight of classes, hypocrisy of both the bourgeois and the working class, a historical moment in France with the fascism growing, the ridiculous role of the clerical and an unsolved murder case. The story is centered in Céléstine, but the motives why a woman with her profile accepts a job in a rural area is never clear. The identity of the rapist and killer of Claire is also not disclosed, there is only a strong insinuation that Joseph killed the girl. The story is very ironic, like for example when Monsieur Monteil is informed that Céléstine and Joseph will marry and requires the sexual favors from Marianne; or the weird fetishism of Monsieur Rabour; or the priest asking for a new roof for the church to Madame Monteil; or the conclusion with Captain Mauger changing his will and serving the mistress and smart Céléstine on their bed. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "O Diário de uma Camareira" ("The Diary of a Chambermaid")

MisterWhiplash The first time I saw Diary of a Chambermaid I did like it, but I didn't find it as fulfilling as some of Luis Bunuel's other later films made in France. There was something that didn't really seem to snap up and draw me in with his usual biting satire. A second viewing, however, had me really focus though not for what wasn't there but what was. Like more than a few other Bunuel films, some of them in France and others in Mexico, the style Bunuel uses for Diary of a Chambermaid is very controlled, not static but rather formal and, in its paradoxical way to Bunuel's intentions, restrained. But it's this very restraint and formality- both in the camera and how the characters interact- that helped make it clearer for me, and more interesting. One does have to put it into context, not just from the time period the story is set in, decades before the film was made, but also how these kinds of bourgeoisie dramas were made in France and elsewhere in Europe. For a moment I'm even reminded of Rules of the Game by showing both the lower and upper classes in one such estate. There isn't really a specific story as much as a series of events leading Celestine (the always beautiful Jeanne Moreau) through her time as maid for the Monteils and up to finally breaking free of their own repressive ways.This isn't made really clear until later in the film, including what must have been a 'hot' scene in 1964 for French and other audiences as Moreau is in some kinky maid-wear (it's one of my favorite scenes from the film). However seeing it a second time I found it funnier once I could get more into what these perverse, strange, corrupted characters were all about, on both the servant and served sides. The Monsieur, for example, has a certain fetish for high-heeled footwear, which elicits a nice laugh, if not a big one. And then a farmer, who is practically drooling over Celestine, suddenly has to cope with the fact that she is, of course, from Paris of all places. But then the story does thicken with the murder part. The goods that come with Diary of a Chambermaid, as envisioned by Bunuel, is really in him seeing through the conventional- which he puts forward almost TOO well- and finding enough to criticize and have little bits of fun with. It's these circumstances that pop up for Celestine that all make their toll, even if its not very constant. It's not a surreal-style movie in the Bunuel mode, but he still makes some time to not let anyone off the hook; Celestine does do an about-face from how she previously acted, though so much has happened with the other characters that it's not too much of a surprise.In fact, it's on a very subtle level nearly reaches the gleeful vulgarity and near moral decay of Bunuel's masterwork Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. If it isn't as accessible it's because it's more riffing on another work than the surefire confidence and bravura of an original piece. And the same lucidity that is laid as the groundwork, when not marked over by Bunuel's obsessions and satire (if not surrealism), almost comes close to making a scene or two duller than need be- plus, as others have noted, the bad ending. Nevertheless it's a splendid take on what is really dark subject matter, put into (for the only time for the director) anamorphic widescreen to put these character even more into the fullness of the hypocrisies. It's subversion done with tact, and the star of it, as par for the great string of films she had, is near perfect. And at least the director leaves his most featured small-role actress, Muni, get out clean.