DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID
1964,
Rialto Pictures,
101 min,
France,
Dir: Luis Buñuel
Jeanne Moreau gives a keenly observant and morally ambiguous performance as Parisian maid Céléstine, transplanted to the French countryside to clean house at the manor of M. Monteil (a lusty, wolfish Michel Piccoli). What she discovers in her wintry bucolic surroundings is anything but staid country life - shoe fetishes, simmering anti-Semitism and a brutal rape and murder are all pieces of the unsettling debris that rise to the surface in Luis Buñuel’s wicked, kinky take on the upstairs-downstairs genre. In French with English subtitles.