The Diary of a Chambermaid
Directed by
Radu Jude
Library Pricing:
DVD $150.00
Blu-ray $150.00
PPR $350.00
DRL $499.00
PPR+DRL $599.00
To submit an order, request a preview screener, or ask a question contact Erin Farrell
Gianina, a young Romanian, works as a housekeeper for a bourgeois family in Bordeaux. In the evenings, she rehearses the role of a maid with an amateur theater troupe in an adaptation of The Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau. She takes care of Louen, her employers’ son, while her own daughter is growing up far from her, in Romania. The maternal absence deepens into a wound but, as Christmas approaches, the promise of a reunion begins to take shape.
Cast
- Ana Dumitrascu
- Mélanie Thierry
- Vincent Macaigne
- Marie Rivière
- Louen Bouteiller
- "Diary of a Chambermaid... ends on a bittersweet note whose nimbleness fully encapsulates why Radu Jude is among our great filmmakers. "
- "[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’s still the same story."
- "Just as Mirbeau’s novel decried the disparities between the haves and have-nots in his era, in his own subdued way Jude argues that that divide has only grown worse in the last 125 years."
- "The diary’s final entry is its best, an unadorned and affecting maternal melodrama with geopolitical implications, and a deus ex machina ending punctuated, in the film’s closing, shot, by an ironic wink."
- "The Diary of a Chambermaid may not be Jude’s most surprising provocation, but it seems like his freshest."
- "[T]his satiric anti-capitalist takedown builds confidently towards an explosive final act that'll likely catch you unawares."
- "Radu Jude manages to construct a picture that is not only intelligent and witty but also incredibly thought-provoking...."
- "Jude’s Diary of a Chambermaid is an exuberant hodgepodge of genre modes...."
- "Jude executes the melange with certainty, mixing it all together into a welcome velouté of political modernity and dark humour."
- "Like Mirbeau before him, Jude dissects bourgeois rot through formal mischief and corrosive irony, though he does so for an age of migrant precarity, performative liberalism, and atomized labor. Grade: A."
Gallery
Awards & Recognition
Nominated
Directors' Fortnight Audience Award
Cannes Film Festival
Directors' Fortnight Audience Award
Cannes Film Festival
Official Selection
New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
Official Selection
Toronto Int'l. Film Festival
Toronto Int'l. Film Festival
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