Word: uel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...good actor. What makes Moreau uniquely convincing is how little she does to accomplish so much: she smiles warmly at the husband she is about to betray-but haven't her eyes changed focus? She obediently lends herself to her master's fetishes in Luis Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid, but the chill hints of resignation that cross her face prove a heart full of nausea and disdain. "You don't have to act in front of a camera," she says. "You just have to be concerned...
Diary of a Chambermaid, like the Gallic classic on which it is based, begins as a gay little gibe at the manners and morals of a French provincial town. Like most movies made by Mexico's Luis Buñuel (Los Olvidados, The Exterminating Angel), it ends as a harrowing vision of hell on earth. In the early reels Buñuel respectfully inspects the comfortable surfaces of life in a "good family." In the rest of the film, with the help of his cunning heroine (Jeanne Moreau), he cruelly forces the family's closets and drags...
...Exterminating Angel, one of the strongest of Buñuel's many strong films, relates a harrowing parable of salvation and damnation in which the grand old anarchist pours all the vials of his wrath upon the idle rich and the mother church and in the process disports a religious imagination seldom paralleled in its demonian ferocity since the visions of Hieronymus Bosch...