THE STORY – A young Romanian woman living in France works for a French family and joins a theatre company who are adapting Octave Mirbeau’s “The Diary of a Chambermaid.”
THE CAST – Ana Dumitrașcu, Marie Rivière, Mélanie Thierry & Vincent Macaigne
THE TEAM – Radu Jude (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 94 Minutes
Ilinca Manolache, a frequent collaborator of Radu Jude, expressed to The New Yorker in their profile “The Bard of Bucharest” that his “films are political, like Godard’s films are. But it’s more than that. They are sensual, they have moments of extreme fragility, and they are very beautiful.” Since his 2021 Golden Bear winner “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” his work has continued to gesture toward Romanian economics and diaspora, but with the bite of a swipe rather than anything resembling contemporary Western filmmaking practice. His politics arrive less through thesis than through circulation; like Donald Trump discussing addiction and sobriety on The Joe Rogan Experience, Jude understands that the smaller the screen, the greater the canvas.
Shot in France and set over the course of three months, “The Diary of a Chambermaid,” Jude’s loose adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s French novel of the same name, feels, by extension, like a departure. Although featuring a female protagonist, Gianina (Ana Dumitrascu), a young Romanian working as a housekeeper for a bourgeois family in Bordeaux, the usual punk, active attitude is replaced with a discreet, careful composure that treats the film’s diaristic structure as a countdown to her inevitable objective: Christmas. As such, the film functions as a series of interactions and routines — housekeeping, rehearsals for a stage adaptation of “The Diary of a Chambermaid,” whereby Gianina is playing the role of Celestine on stage, and low-fi footage of the Romanian countryside — that delicately serve the purpose of widening the divide between herself and her country.
The Romanian countryside, shot through both the front-facing camera of Gianina’s daughter, Maria’s (Sofia Dragonman) FaceTime calls and naturalistically to illustrate late-night Romanian fairytales shared with Louen (Louen Bouteiler), the son of the Donnadieus, the couple Gianina works for, is characterized by two sides of the same nostalgic coin: one of Jude’s own, shooting out of the country for the first time, and one of the generic yearning of a woman working in another country whose child has stayed back home. It’s this same dual mold that best describes Dumitrascu’s performance: a careful blend of the typical sarcastic bite of Jude’s protagonists, privately shared in sharp interactions back home, and the front-facing, disarmed housemaid navigating the higher echelons of French bureaucracy around her.
“The Diary of a Chambermaid” seems equally interested in these local themes as it is in engaging with classics of film history. Where “Kontinental ’25” appeared preoccupied with Rossellini and Antonioni, here Jude turns his attention toward Renoir and Buñuel, both of whom previously adapted Mirbeau’s text. Gianina’s rehearsals, staged as single-take extracts from Mirbeau’s novel, foreground the friction between the text’s vulgarity and the gentility imposed upon Gianina in daily life. These long takes also take advantage of the film’s many juxtapositions, including the theater’s casting of amateur actors, typically immigrants, and allowing them to perform in a carnivalesque manner.
By the nature of the film’s countdown and the inevitability of its Christmas setting, Jude is able to play with the acidity of the situation, blending nostalgia, melancholy, and the gentle warmth of the season into a winky-faced final act that quietly disassembles the specific immigrant narrative at its center. While not quite at his satirical best, “The Diary of a Chambermaid” has a more muted tone that helps foreground the maturity of Jude’s form and continues the quieter tension he began exploring after the balls-to-the-wall “Dracula.” Not a story of unrest, but rather one of rest against the friction of your surroundings.
