A Hollywood Fairytale: Renoir's Diary of a Chambermaid

Abstract

jean renoir's Hollywood adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's turn-of-thecentury novel baffled critics on both sides of the Atlantic. The French critics generally panned it as a Hollywood sellout, and the Americans dubbed it too French for homegrown audiences.2 While it is reminiscent of themes of Renoir's great realist films of the 1930s in which issues of class and gender predominate, it treats those themes in an entirely new manner. A story that makes for a perfect naturalist film is turned on its head to become a bizarre clash of farce and tragedy, both a romp and a dark exploration of human greed and manipulation. It is this odd combination that makes the film resistant to easy categorizations, but also what renders it a fascinating mix of old and new in Renoir's cinema. It re-engages with earlier themes through new forms of representation, and does so from the refreshing perspective of a questing heroine. Celestine's journey from chambermaid to wife of a wealthy man is certainly the stuff of fairytales, but it is also a product of Hollywood's dream factory, and the film takes an interesting detour through 1940s gothic romance and the women's film in its heyday. Viewed from this angle, Diary of a Chambermaid is less a case of what the critics saw as a failed realism than a fairytale in realist garb, and one refracted through Hollywood melodrama of the war years. Mirbeau's novel, in diary form, focuses on the ubiquitous corruption, egotism, cruelty, and perversion of the ruling classes as observed by Celestine throughout her life as a chambermaid in aristocratic and bourgeois households. With subtle psychological detail, it also bears witness to the corruption of Celestine herself as she succumbs to the seductions of Joseph, the valet to the Lanlaires, who not only shares the anti-republican, Catholic, and anti-Semitic values of his masters, but is probably a murderer as well. Mirbeau's vitriolic social critique presents a France in the grips of a right-wing militaristic and xenophobic patriotism espoused with grim determination by the lower classes. Joseph and Celestine end up married owners of a bar in Cherbourg where just such elements are welcome. © South Central Review 25.2 (Summer 2008): 45-62.

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