Whenever I've watched a film by Luis Bunuel, invariably the feeling arises of having watched something quite anomalous and slightly out-of-sync with the times and culture in which it was produced. It's not so much the distinctiveness of the Bunuelian style - his ample detours into moments of disquieting strangeness and incongruity - as it is his consistent ability to quietly and calmly pull the rug out from underneath the ordinary way that most fictional characters in cinema go about their business. That even applies to the more aggressive and artistically adventurous films that have accompanied his early Criterion Collection entries. 1961's Viridiana and 1962's The Exterminating Angel each established lasting reputations for the scandals they provoked and their defiance of audience expectations in an era that was quite noted for its appetite for intellectual rigor and aesthetic challenge. Bunuel always seems capable of surprising his viewers even when they come to his films expecting to be mentally jostled by his images and unpredictably random intrusions, alert to the fact that they're likely to see something weird and shocking that still doesn't have to stoop to the level of juvenile vulgarity or graphic violence.
Which makes his 1964 film Diary of a Chambermaid something of an anomaly itself among Bunuel's work, in that it's the most conventionally plotted and crafted film he made in this celebrated final phase of his career, more akin in its surface aesthetic to the kind of "hybrid" films he made in Mexico throughout the 1950s. In those films, Bunuel had to work within the constraints of a fairly straightforward narrative, even if the subjects still involved his favored themes of erotic repression, religious oppression and imaginative suppression, all filtered through the various scripts and story lines sent his way. More often than not, his films were under-financed and subjected to any number of compromises to persuade the financial backers, get past the censors and hold out some hope of commercial appeal to audiences as yet not ready to appreciate Bunuel's idiosyncracies.
Over the course of that decade, and with growing interest during the late 50s and early 60s in more unusual expressions of art house cinema, Bunuel's pioneering efforts in the Parisian Surrealist scene and ongoing curiosities produced in Mexico restored his diminished reputation enough to get him clearance in Spain to produce Viridiana... which promptly ran smack into problems with the censors in Generalissimo Franco's regime. The film was banned and only saved because Bunuel's producer had the foresight to bury the original prints on his property before they could be impounded and destroyed. Still, enough of the European free thinking crowd had seen the film to recognize it as a masterpiece, and they validated their opinion with a Palme d'or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. Emboldened by that endorsement, Bunuel made The Exterminating Angel (shot once again in the relative safety of Mexico), which did an end-run around Spain, landing in Cannes in 1962 and winning a critics' award, less distinguished than the Palme d'or but still quite impressive. Clearly, Bunuel had discovered his niche with the European art house crowd, eager to embrace this unjustly persecuted and long neglected grand master among the auteurs of that day.
So the question facing Bunuel and his new collaborators in France was, what would he do for a follow-up? My contention is that Diary of a Chambermaid, as brilliant of a film as it turned out to be, was something along the lines of a "safe bet" that Bunuel took on as he attempted to enter the mainstream of Continental movie making. My argument is simple: by casting nouvelle vague icon Jeanne Moreau and the popular, versatile Michel Piccoli in the lead roles, Bunuel had name recognition and New Wave stars working in his favor. (No slight intended toward Silvia Pinal, star of Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel, but she wasn't regarded as an accomplished actor at the time, more just a pretty woman who happened to be the producer's wife.) To pique added interest, the story was an adaptation of a fairly notorious libertine novel written in 1900 that, as its title implied, provided an intimate glimpse at the life of a Parisian servant woman and all the adventures, sexual and otherwise, she fell into after taking a housekeeping job at a rich country estate. I haven't read the novel, but here's a link to a brilliantly researched and thorough review on The Pink Smoke website by someone who has. It diligently compares the book to its two film adaptations, the other one directed by Jean Renoir in his early 1940s sojourn in Hollywood. It has much more to say about the film itself than I do, so I recommend it without hesitation to anyone seeking to dig deeper into this film than I intend to here. It's hard for me to disregard the obvious appeal of a pitch that went something along the lines of "imagine what Bunuel, that bizarre iconoclast who's so unafraid to take on religion, will unleash in this risque tale of a sexy little minx played by Jeanne Moreau, in this era of increasingly frank sexuality on screen." That's the impression we get from the poster shown above... but that's really not what we get.
Instead, what Bunuel does deliver is a fascinating but somewhat dry skewering of bourgeois hypocrisy, provincial bigotry and the ridiculous petty preoccupations of the poor and the privileged alike. As the urbane and stylishly attractive chambermaid Celestine, Jeanne Moreau comports herself with serene inscrutability, almost to a fault, except that she can pull off such a performance like no one else and I can gladly track the path of her vision off into the distance as her steady gaze instantly absorbs and evaluates the escalating absurdities, indignities and horrors she observes in the estate of M. and Mme. Monteil and vicinity. There's no real character study going on here - Celestine remains an enigma through to the end, never revealing her motivations and perhaps not nearly as in control of what drives her behavior as her impeccable composure would indicate. But she wins some degree of admiration simply for keeping a level head as she runs the gauntlet of an elderly shoe fetishist, the lecherous head of the household, his miserly frigid wife and the brutish head groundskeeper and his perpetual air of surly menace and impending assault that keeps everyone else on edge.
What I appreciate most about Diary of a Chambermaid is what makes it unique among the Bunuel films currently archived in the Criterion Collection: the exceptional beauty and clarity of Roger Fellous' black and white 2.35:1 Franscope compositions (Bunuel would return to 1.66:1 ratios for the rest of his career) and his relative degree of restraint and reasonable concession to engaging the mass audience, with just a few gratuitous Bunuelisms tossed in (the shotgunned butterfly, the creeping snails, "making the little boots come alive," the seduction scene involving Bunuel's old friend and bit player Muni, etc.) There are some who regard this as their favorite Bunuel film of them all, or who at least make the vigorous argument that it ought to be considered among his very best. While I respect the strong opinions and continue to consider their case, I think of Diary of a Chambermaid as more of a warm-up for his greatest made-in-France masterpiece, Belle de Jour, which built on a similar formula of adapting a famous ribald novel and casting a visually compelling and glamorous female star in the lead. It generated even more sensational reactions than the Cannes winners that preceded it (as well as this film.) But before Bunuel could get around to working with Catherine Deneuve in glorious Eastmancolor, he had another Mexican debacle to get through in Simon of the Desert. As it turned out, his rustic idyll in the French countryside provided a well-timed respite from the rigorous ordeal that he was about to endure in his adopted home, and the nicely appointed mansion, with its pig-headed owners and boorish servants, provided a suitable environment for Bunuel to refresh himself on the rules of the Euro-cinematic game... and how to subvert them.
Next: Charulata