04/06/2002 Entry:
"Diary Of A Chambermaid - Luis Buñuel (1964)"

This was part of the Gene Siskel Film Center's Buñuel series. Of the four Buñuel movies I have seen (the others being The Discrete Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object Of Desire, and The Exterminating Angel) this is definitely the one that struck me the least. It is also the most straightforward. I'm unsure if the two are connected, but I wouldn't doubt it. I'm somewhat hard pressed to describe why this left me so cold. Many of the standard Buñuel themes like religion and class relations are present, and there are some very funny and well done scenes. The bit where dirty old man Jean Ozenne is making Jeanne Moreau strut around in the little boots, cooing about watching those tiny shoes move, was quite great and felt like something out of his later works.

I think it took a wrong turn for me with the murder of the little girl Claire. From then on I felt like the film was wandering without direction or purpose. A scene like the one described above tries to show how the upper classes treat the lower with derision when they are in fact more perverted. But here we learn Joseph is the worst of them all. There is also something being said about Celestine as she attempts to draw out Joseph and has him arrested, although I'm unsure what. That aspect didn't gel for me at all. I'm not familiar with the source material (a novel by Octave Mirbeau adapted by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière) so I can't speak to how that did or did not affect the film.

I find I have this problem with a lot of foreign films around this era - Jules And Jim and L'avventura come to mind. Technically, I found both films marvelous, beautiful, and deserving of their place in film history. But as stories about people, I was lost and confused. The beahaviors of the characters confounded me. Is this a generational thing? An American thing? I don't know. In this case, the behavior of Celestine in relation to Joseph seemed bizarre. She is convinced he is the one who killed little Claire, does she seduce him just to draw him out and set him up? Does she feel her best revenge is setting him up to believe she loves him, then turning him over to the police? This would explain her look of anguish at the end, when the Captain tells her Joseph has been set free. She went through all that for nothing. It seems to make some sense now, after I've spent a couple days thinking about it, why didn't it come through for me at the time? This puts me in the position of seeing a film I didn't particularly care for again, so I can see what is wrong with it (or me perhaps.)

From a filmmaking standpoint, I like it quite a bit. It is shot in very nice black and white by Roger Fellous, with lots of slow tracking shots and long takes. It lacks any kind of musical soundtrack at all, a trademark of Buñuel's which I quite enjoy. While I often enjoy films by directors like Scorcese and P.T. Anderson with rock soundtracks punctuating key plot points, I noticed while watching That Obscure Object Of Desire (which also has virtually no musical soundtrack) and this film that the lack of a soundtrack really keeps the focus on the film. It forces the filmmaker to turn to his craft for emtional cues, and it forces the actors to put forth that much more. Another film I saw recently, Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Puppetmaster, had very little soundtrack aside from some incidental music. Additionally, it had virtually no camera movement - almost every shot was limited to a tripod-mounted camera standing stock still, with an occasional bit of tracking as people moved around a shot. But the performances, lighting and editing were so nuanced that I was rarely bored. Quite a feat for a movie that is 2.5 hours long. I definitely am starting to feel that too many filmmakers use rock soundtacks as a crutch or a way to tell the audience, "here is where you feel sad...oh you can feel good again now." Of course as soon as I feel that way I'll see something like Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express, one of my favorite films of all time which is nothing but flash and pop music. Its a tool like anything else that can be used for good or evil.

So this film lost me somewhere, although watching it was an interesting experience. The Buñuel series continunes into next month, and I am hoping to get to at least a couple more. In particular I feel I need to see Belle De Jour, however since its available on DVD I will probably give Tristana and Phantom Of Liberty higher priority. Hmmm, I just now was reading some comments on the Belle De Jour DVD and many people are commenting that the transfer quality is poor and that the subtitles have problems, so I may have to get to that one after all.