Madman's Director's Suite series gets another fine entry with this truly superb release of Luis Buñuel's 1964 adaptation of a novel first published in 1900 by author Octave Mirbeau.
The story, set in 1930s France, has been summarised somewhat dryly as a tale about the rise of Fascism. This might be a true and accurate description of the movies thematic content, but it doesn't begin to tap the mystique of Buñuel's delightfully scabrous vision of class divisions, racial hatred, snobbery and sexual deceit.
The plot has Jeanne Moreau as Celestine, a chambermaid, arriving in a Normandy village, ready to take up a post in this grand mansion – a home of civic power, but, as it turns out, a place of tortured souls as well. Instead of a familiar tale of 'upstairs/downstairs' – with the masters as the bad guys, and the servants as the virtuous under-dogs, Buñuel unravels a bitter tale where standards of good and evil get lost in a maze of perverse yearnings; the sinister Old Patriarch has a foot fetish, the Master feels that any woman is his to have and the Lady of the Manor finds sex repellent. Joseph (Georges Géret), one of the chateau’s servants, divides his time by ranting about the rise of 'Jewry' and terrorising his cohorts. Meanwhile, Celestine watches all this; her motives, seemingly as opportunistic and glib as everyone else's. But Buñuel deliberately withholds anything approaching moral certitude.
Sound and image are superb on the disc and Melbourne based film scholar Adrian Martin contributes another revealing and engrossing commentary track that carefully and sensitively works through an appreciation of Buñuel's complex directorial style. Today, Chambermaid is thought of as a classic, but as Martin reveals, at the time (when critics were deep in the thrall of New Wave style, technique and attitude) the film was considered flat and a little old hat. Don’t miss it.
