by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ana Dumitrașcu, Mélanie Thierry, Vincent Macaigne, Marie Rivière
Intro:
… ironic, politically alert and suspicious of every supposedly progressive position.
Radu Jude has become one of the most prolific filmmakers in contemporary European cinema, sometimes releasing two films in a single year. Yet, Diary of a Chambermaid, presented in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, feels slightly different from some of his recent work.
For the first time, much of Jude’s dialogue is in French, and the film brings him into direct contact with a French cast, including Mélanie Thierry and Vincent Macaigne. But beneath this new linguistic and cultural territory, Jude remains unmistakably himself: ironic, politically alert and suspicious of every supposedly progressive position.
At the centre is Gianina, played by Ana Dumitrașcu, a young Romanian woman working as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Bordeaux. She cleans floors, polishes antique dishes and looks after Louen, her employers’ young son. Her own daughter, Maria, is growing up hundreds of kilometres away in a Romanian village. The two maintain contact through video calls, and Gianina promises to come home for Christmas. Maria misses her mother so desperately that she marks the days on the wall, as her grandmother observes, like a prisoner counting time.
The emotional situation becomes even more painful because Gianina is effectively mothering someone else’s child while her own daughter is growing up without her. When an accident in the French family forces her to postpone her journey home, the promise of a reunion becomes another source of disappointment. Jude does not turn this into sentimental migrant melodrama. Instead, he observes the mechanics of economic inequality almost clinically: Gianina’s absence from her daughter is not simply a personal choice but the consequence of a system in which care can be bought in one country while it is missing in another.
The title refers to Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel The Diary of a Chambermaid, a brutal examination of class, domestic service and bourgeois hypocrisy. Jude does not attempt a conventional adaptation. The Mirbeau material exists inside the film as a theatrical performance. Gianina joins an amateur troupe created around migrant and socially engaged performers, where she rehearses the role of a chambermaid. Her stage partner is an elderly French man playing the “master”, a grotesque figure whose sexual perversity, cruelty towards women and violence towards animals expose the ugliness hidden behind bourgeois respectability.
These theatrical scenes are among Jude’s most playful constructions. The troupe is clearly sympathetic to migrants, feminism and political activism, yet Jude refuses to exempt even these progressive spaces from his satire. His humour works in several directions at once. Nobody is allowed to occupy the position of unquestioned moral authority, and even solidarity becomes something that can be performed, rehearsed and institutionalised.
The structure reinforces this idea. Gianina’s everyday life is organised chronologically, moving through the months from September towards January, while the theatrical episodes repeatedly interrupt the domestic routine. The result is a film in which work and performance gradually begin to mirror each other. Gianina performs as a servant on stage, but she is also performing one in everyday life. The difference is that in the theatre, the exploitation is exaggerated and openly acknowledged, while in the bourgeois household it is hidden beneath politeness, salary and apparently benevolent relationships.
Jude expands this class satire into a broader political portrait of contemporary Europe. Conversations at the family table move casually from historical references to Ceaușescu and Palestine to arguments about Russia’s war against Ukraine, while videos from the trenches enter the supposedly comfortable domestic environment. Political positions become another form of bourgeois conversation, something discussed over food before everyone returns to their private lives.
Jude’s Kontinental ‘25 similarly approached the war in Ukraine through questions of European responsibility and political helplessness, and here, the same scepticism towards comfortable Western self-image returns in a different form.
Yet Diary of a Chambermaid occasionally abandons Jude’s usual intellectual aggression for something much quieter. During one of Gianina’s monologues, the film cuts to landscapes in her Romanian village: empty roads, neglected houses, collapsing wooden structures and a countryside marked by economic abandonment. Gianina herself points out the contradiction of living in a country that is now part of the European Union while large parts of its rural landscape still appear trapped in another century. These images are not simply sociological illustrations. They give physical form to the distance between Eastern and Western Europe that the film explores through Gianina’s divided life.
And then, after all this intellectual and political preparation, Jude arrives at one of his most concise and unexpectedly funny endings. A Christmas tree ornament becomes the final gesture – and this is not a spoiler!
