Adapted from Octave Mirbeau’s original 1900 novel (“Journal d’une femme de chambre”), which has already had two successful film adaptations from masters Renoir and Buñuel, “The Diary of a Chambermaid” gets its third telling for the big screen, this time from director Benoit Jacquot.
Léa Seydoux follows in the footsteps of Paulette Goddard and Jeanne Moreau to play the role of Célestine, a young Parisian chambermaid whose beauty and desirability highlights the class system and social milieu of the time.
The movie follows the dutiful and desirable young chambermaid Célestine from serving one house to the next, Séyodoux bringing her sly and knowing smile to each new master. Starting out tending to the Lanlaire house with the stuffy Madame (Clotilde Mollet) and her groping husband Monsieur Lanlaire (Hervé Pierre), she catches the eye of the brooding gardener Joseph (Vincent Lindon) before eventually returning to her first destination, ready to break free for good.
Nominated for the 2015 Golden Berlin Bear (the highest prize awarded for the best film at the Berlin Film Festival), “Chambermaid” is clearly made excellently and with a high pedigree. Jacquot, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Hélène Zimmer, attempts to infuse a certain kind of post-Freud modernity to this telling, showing the repressions and compulsions of both the high and low class that surrounds Célestine.
While Jacquot’s intent to combine the period-piece story with modern touches feels like an exciting update, the result is overbearing. Jacquot’s choice to modernize the movie creates fissures that expose the distracting worlds of old and new.
Choices to infuse French-translated “for sure,” are out of place, and the camera’s perplexing and zoom-ins on characters’ faces pulls the audience out every time. Couple this with choppy leaps in time and the result leaves scattered instances of individual strengths but compounded together, makes for an unfocused movie.
“The Diary of a Chambermaid” has many strengths, including its wonderfully rich world led by costume and production design and art department, even if the movie stalls out in its uneven adaptation.
‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ is not rated. 96 min.
