“Capitalism,” the writer Rayne Fisher-Quann recently semi-joked, “makes women of us all.” That is, subsumes our own agency, expropriates our labor, and turns us into passive receptacles for someone else’s desire. Radu Jude, with typical extravagance, extends the metaphor: Capitalism makes Romanian women of us all. His films are invariably fronted by women who are exploited and condescended to, particularly at work; and who stand in for the status of his native country as a subservient subservient partner in the EU, a source of cheap labor and paternalistic monetary policy, shamefully desperate to attract investment for the real-estate developments that uglify its urban landscape.
His new film is the most direct expression of this dynamic yet: The Diary of a Chambermaid concerns Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu), an EU migrant from a remote, rural portion of Romania, who has never even been to Bucharest, but lives in Bordeaux, working as a housekeeper and nanny for an absurdly wealthy French family. The film is such a perfect encapsulation of Jude’s preoccupations that he can basically replay variations on his characteristic scenes to make a rich text in a singular voice; it’s proof that he’s a major contemporary filmmaker even when he barely gets out of second gear.
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The film is very loosely inspired by Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel of the same title, mostly in its exploration of master-servant dynamics. What would we do without her, gush Gianina’s employers, Marguerite and Pierre Donnadieu, played by Melanie Thierry and Vincent Macaigne. She cooks their meals, following the recipes in their hip Thai cookbooks underneath the “Dans la maison” poster in their kitchen; she cleans, never breaking the racist statues in their wunderkammer; she tells their son Louen engrossing and very sad Romanian folktales, which upset him so much that Marguerite mother gently tells her off, while good-cop Pierre makes don’t‑listen-to-her gestures behind his wife’s back.
Like last year’s Kontinental ‘25, The Diary of a Chambermaid is Jude consciously working in the shadow of the Western European arthouse canon; the novel was previously adapted by Renoir and Buñuel (and in 2015 by Benoît Jacquot, as a vehicle for Léa Seydoux). The previous film adaptations are present as scenes from play Gianina acts in in her spare time, a new adaptation of Mirbeau by a performatively woke university theater troupe (headed by Bobita herself, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’s Ilinca Manolache), who work with migrants and other disadvantaged actors. The salaciousness and sexual power games of the source material play out in very Radu Jude fashion, as a broad comedy of base desire with exaggerated air-humping choreography. Offstage, the permanent staff of the theater congratulate each other by snapping whenever someone lectures Gianina about vegetarianism and animal abuse, for instance.
In the past, Jude’s female protagonists have displayed saintly endurance of life’s indignities even as they also enjoy robust and pleasurable sex lives; their libidos become instruments of rebellion in their lives, and sources of dumb vitality for his movies. Unlike the women of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, and Kontinental ‘25, Gianina does not have a sex life, at least that we know about; if she has any unruly or disruptive desires, they’re sublimated into the Romanian curses she allows herself under her breath when the Donnadieus want something from her. Her exploitation is more subtle and her suffering more humble (cleaning in a headscarf, she at times cuts an old-world religious figure). She is no saint; Jude is also a satirist of the peculiarities of the Romanian national character, particularly the gaps in its knowledge of its own history, and Gianina is at one point brought up short by a mention of Romanian antisemitism.
The film is literally structured as a diary, with scenes broken up by dates flashing up on a black screen. The vignettish conceit suits Jude’s short-form imagination (he loves to show interviewers his favorite memes and TikToks), and scenes are often brought up short on a punchy, punchline‑y cut to black, moving on to the next day as fall moves into winter. Gianina is looking forward to her Christmas holiday, and her return to Romania, where her daughter awaits her at her mother’s, living off Gianina’s remittances with impatience shading into anguish; Gianina placates her on regular FaceTime calls, sometimes even when playing soccer with the rich kid she’s raising in lieu of her own.
The film unfolds in the comparatively somber and naturalistic register of Kontinental ‘25, or the last chapter of Dracula; to enliven Gianina’s quite sad narrative, Jude relies heavily on the great neurotic comic Macaigne to find the funny as a very familiar type from Jude’s filmography, the oblivious and privileged liberal, hectoring and belittling Gianina with his thoughtless praise and heroic allyship. (Pierre, too, forces his friends to watch videos, including explicit acts of violence from the war in Ukraine, to prove a point about the need for Western Europe to support the East.) This, of course, does not stop him from taking advantage of Gianina’s financial disadvantage, dashing off on a ski holiday and buffaloing her into taking on healthcare responsibilities for his elderly mother. (She’s played by Rohmer regular Marie Rivière, whose discussion of 1968 reveals the blind spots of a previous generation.)
Kontinental ‘25 is a loose a remake of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51, a film concerning a bourgeois woman’s quest for atonement, and The Diary of a Chambermaid is likewise a spiritual trial, which for Gianina climaxes at a wrenching Christmas. 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.
