The Diary of a Chambermaid / Jean Renoir / 1946

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The Diary of a Chambermaid

1946 Comedy / Drama

Credits

Director: Jean Renoir
Script: André Heuse (play), André de Lorde (play), Burgess Meredith, Octave Mirbeau (novel), Thielly Nores
Photo: Lucien N. Andriot
Music: Michel Michelet
Cast: Paulette Goddard (Célestine), Burgess Meredith (Captain Mauger), Hurd Hatfield (Georges Lanlaire), Francis Lederer (Joseph), Judith Anderson (Madame Lanlaire), Florence Bates (Rose), Irene Ryan (Louise), Reginald Owen (Captain Lanlaire), Almira Sessions (Marianne)
Country: USA
Language: English
Runtime: 91 min; B&W
Aka: Le Journal d'une femme de chambre

Summary

In the early 1900s, a young chambermaid, Célestine, arrives from Paris to take up her new post at a country house in Normandy. Her employers are the Lanlaires, a pair of staunch monarchists whose mortal enemy is their eccentric Republican neighbour, Captain Mauger. Madame Lalaire plans to exploit Célestine’s charms to persuade her moody son, Georges, to stay at the family home. Célestine quickly discovers that she has four suitors – Monsieur Lalaire, Mauger, Georges, and Joseph, the Lanlaires’ funereal valet. She has no interest in love; all she wants is to marry a man with wealth so that she will never have to work again…

Review

The Diary of a Chambermaid was the penultimate film made by French director Jean Renoir during his stint in Hollywood in the 1940s, a satisfying blend of farce and melodrama which is widely regarded as one of his best English-language films. It is an adaptation of the 1931 play "Le roman d'une femme de chambre" by André de Lorde and André Heuzé, which was based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau (a friend and sponsor of the director’s father, the painter Auguste Renoir).

The film stars Paulette Goddard, famously the side-kick and one-time wife of the comedy giant Charlie Chaplin (she starred in several of his best known films). At the height of her popularity and skill as a performer, the charismatic Goddard is radiant as the heroine of The Diary of a Chambermaid, showing her distinctive flair for pathos and comedy. There are some pleasing contributions from her co-stars, particularly Burgess Meredith (the film's co-producer and Goddard's husband at the time) as the mad flower-eating hedonist Mauger and Francis Lederer as the thoroughly creepy villain Joseph (who looks like something that just hobbled off the set of a German expressionist horror film).

Of the half a dozen or so films that Jean Renoir made in Hollywood, The Diary of a Chambermaid is the one that is most readily identifiable as his work and nearest to his previous French films. The film it most resembles is his 1939 masterpiece, La Règle du jeu, which was also concerned with the tensions between the ruling elite and the downtrodden lower orders. There are also echoes of an earlier film, Nana (1926) – both films depict an impoverished young woman determined to improve her lot by any means. Add to this the stylistic and textual similarities – Renoir wasn’t afraid to alternate between farce and drama, and in this he succeeds brilliantly. The chillingly dark final passages of the film (very nearly film noir) make a striking contrast with the hilarious comic sequences in the early part of the film. Renoir saw comedy and tragedy as two unavoidable components of human experience, and this can be seen in many of his films.

It is interesting to compare this film with Luis Buñuel’s subsequent version of Mirbeau’s novel, Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1964), which starred Jeanne Moreau. This later film focuses much more on the darker, sexual aspects of the novel, exploring all manner of perversion and wickedness, against the backdrop of a world in moral and social decline (thereby allowing a greater evil - Fascism - to take control). Renoir’s interpretation is far more optimistic and comparatively whimsical (and let’s not forget he was subject to far greater censorship than Buñuel). He effectively uses the story as an excuse to revisit the societal and political themes of his previous films, such as La Règle du jeu and La Grande illusion. The film shows the evil which artificial social barriers can engender and concludes that Utopia (that universally sought Happy Ending) can only be achieved when all men (and women) have equal status.

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