{"id":671663,"date":"2026-05-15T17:56:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T17:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/671663\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T17:56:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T17:56:08","slug":"diary-of-a-chambermaid-review-radu-jude-tackles-a-french-classic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/671663\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Diary of a Chambermaid’ Review: Radu Jude Tackles a French Classic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAt the steady rate of two or three movies a year (shorts and features combined), Romanian director Radu Jude<\/a> has become one of the most prolific auteurs of our time.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat doesn\u2019t always mean quality over quantity. See, for instance, last year\u2019s overstuffed Dracula<\/a>, which was bested by the other film he somehow shot at the same time, the minimalist drama Kontinental \u201925<\/a>. Indeed, not all Jude movies are created equal, though even when they\u2019ve been made too quickly, they\u2019re always brimming with sociopolitical critiques, stylistic innovations and the director\u2019s acerbic sense of humor.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDiary of a Chambermaid\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tA century-old story gets a relevant update.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors\u2019 Fortnight)
Cast: Ana Dumitrascu, Vincent Macaigne, M\u00e9lanie Thierry, Marie Rivi\u00e8re, Louen Bouteiller, Arnaud Baudoin, Ilinca Manolache
Director, screenwriter: Radu Jude
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 34 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tDiary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d\u2019une femme de chambre), which marks Jude\u2019s first feature in French, contains all of the above, as well as a clever meta-structure that provides a running commentary on its famous source material. \u201cA variation on the novel,\u201d is how an opening title card explains this umpteenth take on the controversial (in its day) book by Octave Mirbeau, which was previously adapted to the screen by heavyweights Jean Renoir and Luis Bu\u00f1uel, then most recently by Beno\u00eet Jacquot<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLike Bu\u00f1uel, with whom he shares certain affinities as a filmmaker, Jude sets his movie in the present and takes plenty of liberties with the original text, throwing much of the novel\u2019s plot out the window. But he still manages to capture its essence, transforming the tale of an exploited 19th-century maid into one about a Romanian immigrant working as a nanny for two passive-aggressive French intellectuals.<\/p>\n

\n\tSet in the picturesque southwestern city of Bordeaux \u2014 whose past as a slave-trading hub Jude doesn\u2019t shy away from \u2014 the film chronicles several months in the life of Gianina (the excellent Ana Dumitrascu), who\u2019s employed as an au pair for bourgeois-bohemians Pierre (Vincent Macaigne) and Marguerite (M\u00e9lanie Thierry, also at the fest with competition entry A Woman\u2019s Life<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\n\tTasked with cooking, cleaning and picking their somewhat bratty son, Louen (Louen Bouteiller), up from school, Gianina slaves away in France so she can send money back to Romania, where her young daughter, Maria (Sofia Dragoman), remains with her grandmother (Liliana Ghita) in the countryside.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a story you see taking place in many major western cities nowadays, where wealthy couples pay immigrants for childcare, while those very same immigrants often have their own children back in their homelands. Jude uses this set-up to update Mirbeau\u2019s scathing look at class hierarchies and modern-day slavery, highlighting how the cycle of exploitation remains unbroken over a hundred years later.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe director doubles-down on his adaptation by having Gianina also perform in a theatrical version of Diary of a Chambermaid that\u2019s staged by another Romanian (played by Jude regular Ilinca Manolache) and co-stars a fellow foreigner (Arnaud Baudoin). The rehearsal scenes for that production can be somewhat trying and over-the-top \u2014 what would a Jude movie be without at least one hyper-simulated orgasm? \u2014 but they provide a nice mirror to the rest of the plot, no matter how exaggerated the play is.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film\u2019s best sequences involve Gianina dealing with Pierre and Marguerite, a pair of well-meaning bobos who can\u2019t help ordering her around half the time. Macaigne\u2019s improv skills are on fine display in several hilarious pieces of dialogue that have him clumsily trying to get the nanny to do his bidding, while Thierry plays an icy college professor who acts both concerned about Gianina and completely self-involved.<\/p>\n

\n\tWorking once again with DP Marius Panduru, Jude stages these scenes in crisp, fixed medium-shots that get the best out of the performances. The rest of the film relies on phone footage taken by Gianina as she wanders Bordeaux and talks on Facetime with Maria, who misses her mother dearly and isn\u2019t afraid to say so. As caustic as this version of Diary is, it\u2019s also filled with an underlying sense of longing and melancholy, of being far from your loved ones in a country that isn\u2019t always welcoming. <\/p>\n

\n\tThat sentiment hits its apex just before Christmas, during which Gianina was supposed to travel home and visit her daughter for the first time in months. But the sudden arrival of Louen\u2019s grandmother (played by Eric Rohmer favorite Marie Rivi\u00e8re) winds up changing everyone\u2019s agenda, revealing to what extent Gianina\u2019s personal life matters little when it comes to her employers\u2019 holiday plans.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe story\u2019s rather uplifting resolution probably comes too swiftly and doesn\u2019t exactly resolve all the problems Gianina is facing, but that tends to happen in Jude\u2019s movies. He\u2019s less interested in dramatic arcs or emotional crescendos than in exploring an idea from as many angles as possible \u2014 both thematically and cinematically, and always with a sizable dose of dark humor.<\/p>\n

\n\tHere, he uses Mirbeau\u2019s text as a springboard to lambast the current social order, wavering from the narrative to discuss subjects like Communism, Maoism and the fate of Romanian dictator Ceausescu (beheading is a recurring motif in the film). These may seem like digressions, yet everything is connected in a movie that never ditches its razor-sharp view of class exploitation. It may appear now in new forms and iterations, but even a century or so after the book came out, it\u2019s still the same story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the steady rate of two or three movies a year (shorts and features combined), Romanian director Radu…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671664,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,43877,225439,5328,245858,75,337,39718],"class_list":["post-671663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-2026","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-cannes-reviews","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-radu-jude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}