Cinema: Masterful Maid

Diary of a Chambermaid. Newly arrived from Paris to work in a stolid provincial home, the vixenish maid (Jeanne Moreau) quietly appraises her surroundings. Her employers inhabit a cheerless chateau stuffed with ferns, overprotected objets d'art, and family skeletons. She duly notes that the place is full of opportunities for a clever girl. "Do you mind if I touch your calf?" asks the master, feeling amorous. But Madame is watchful, so the maid bestows her favors instead on Madame's father, a haughty old fetishist who asks only that she hike up her skirts and model his shoe collection. In Diary's jauntiest footnote, Moreau slumps in an armchair letting the old goat fondle her instep while her face mirrors every nuance of amusement, resignation and unutterable boredom. A scene or two later, the fetishist is found dead in his bed, the shoes beside him.

In this abrupt shift of mood, what began as a polished Gallic satire of bourgeois sex and morality suddenly becomes inflamed with black Spanish fury. Director Luis Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel, Viridiana) is the powerful talent whose vision dominates this corrosive, meticulously detailed film based on the 1900 novel by Octave Mirbeau. Buñuel resets the story in the 1920s and tips Mirbeau's well-aimed shafts with poison. But in the end, Diary seems inconclusive, a series of vivid sketches only partially held together by Buñuel's enlightened misanthropy.

Taken scene by scene, the film shows matchless artistry. When the handyman Joseph rapes and murders a neighborhood child he encounters in the woods, violence is unearthed with horror, poetry and compassion in one brief shot of snails inching across the dead girl's leg. In another agonizing sequence, the lady of the manor haltingly discusses her frigidity and her husband's unusual demands with an acquisitive young priest who prefers to talk about repairs for the church roof. "1 can only stress that for you there must be no pleasure," he offers distractedly.

Though the triumph of mean-spirited men is clearly Buñuel's theme, he seems perversely unable or unwilling to settle accounts with the chambermaid, his pivotal character. She spurns her master, loves the murdered child, seduces the sadistic Joseph, promises to marry him, turns him over to the gendarmes with some show of regret, and finally marries the boor next door. Miraculously, Actress Moreau performs a contradictory role with an air of wry and knowing detachment, as if she were privy to soul-deep secrets that even the best directors can only guess at.