The Diary of a Chambermaid / Le journal d'une femme de chambre (1964) - Luis Buñuel

It would finally happen with this film something for Buñuel not unwanted, the filmmaker returned to work in European lands, the Spanish prodigal son was repatriated, if not to Spain, yes to Europe, after decades of absence, after years working in Mexico and acquiring expertise in the craft of filmmaker. Long way had been traveled, not a little evolution and maturity the Iberian has experienced in this point of his life, and his career, his growth and greater definition in his guidelines were already undeniable, when returning to the old continent, he will finally have the opportunity to get the resources to take his work to some of the greatest artistic cusps. The director returns to adapt a literary history, after leaving this custom for some films, now based on a work by Octave Mirbeau, portraying, with corrosive look, the experiences of an attractive woman, who works as a maid, and that when arriving at a new house, will generate diverse masculine reactions, at the same time that she will look for an advantageous pairing for her social condition, while she develops in an environment dominated by aristocrats plagued of despicable defects. It is a film in which Buñuel applies a lot of everything he has learned, from the technical aspect it is one of his most brilliant films, although he has left his surrealism noticeably aside.

               

The actions begin with a young woman, who arrives by train in the countryside, in France, she is Céléstine (Jeanne Moreau), is picked up by Joseph (Georges Géret), taken to a residence where she will be a maid. Meet the gentlemen of the house, Mr. Monteil (Michel Piccoli) and Mrs. Monteil (Françoise Lugagne); she also meets another servant, Marianne (Muni), and Mr. Rabour (Jean Ozenne), father of the lord of the house, who gives boots to her. Soon she is drawing attention, Mr. Monteil professes admiration and desire, then she meets the former military Mauger (Daniel Ivernel); she disturbs Mrs. Monteil by her ways and certain refinements that she brings from Paris, while her husband continues trying to seduce the maid. They receive the visit of the village priest (Jean-Claude Carrière), to whom Mrs. Monteil asks for marital advice, and shortly after they discover Mr. Rabour dead. Joseph in a moment violates and kills a local girl, then tries to seduce Céléstine; Mr. Monteil argues arduously with Mauger, his annoying neighbor. Céléstine, despite suspecting Joseph and his crime, gives in to his courtship, but listens to Mauger's marriage proposal. The police investigate, identify the murderer, arrest him; Céléstine marries Mauger, but learns that Joseph will go free when there is no evidence against him, while a political march takes place.

In this work by the Iberian master, the filmmaker is not long in demonstrating his experience, in showing his expertise obtained with the camera, in his handling, and as well returning a small tribute to the then effervescent and fashionable cinematic current; in this way, the camera in hand will flow, watchword of the Nouvelle Vague, revealing the solemnity and great skill of Buñuel upon entering French lands, where he filmed. The camera behaves with extraordinary ease, reaches a new level the performance of the tool in its freedom, with enormous sobriety moves through the rooms of the residence, it is certainly one of the formally most powerful films of the director, as if when beimg finally working again in Europe, the filmmaker would be insuflated new inspiration. There will be zooms-in, zooms-out, detail shots are made, but the most striking are the sequence shots, repeated exercises never before developed with such prolixity and sobriety by the Iberian, a tribute certainly to the Nouvelle Vague and the management of the camera by that current professed; the genius was already experienced, he was already in the fullness of his faculties, the filmmaker is delighted with his camera, so longed for return to Europe, Buñuel is shown neat, is striving, is one of his films technically majors. The return to Europe, by the way, did not happen in the way the filmmaker thought, but it happened; this film initially he wanted to shoot it in Mexico, with Silvia Pinal as the protagonist, but due to certain problems -scandals caused by Viridiana (1961), and the consequent refusal to shoot there Tristana-, finally, and with the intermediation of the great Fernando Rey, Buñuel made the contacts to return triumphantly to Europe. Thus, the Aragonese could finally forge indelible friendships in his return, valuable and enduring friendships such as screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, in this film acting as well, and producer Serge Silberman; these genuine friendships, especially with the scriptwriter, were some of the pillars on which the final stage of the director's career would be supported. After a long wait, and after noting that there was no other way, finally the born in Calanda shoots again in Europe, new friendships are born, new paths are born, the final stage of Buñuel, for many the brightest, was already on the verge of hatch.

As always in his narrative economy, Buñuel draws us quickly to his female protagonist, she does not doubt in expressing a certain disdain for the field where she is arriving, soon Joseph makes an observation on her shoes, responding with attempts to play innocent; she is cynical, and unequivocally careerist. Her arrival, from the first moment, does not leave anyone indifferent, Mr. Monteil is uneasy in his first contact with her, not to mention Patriarch Rabour and his unique fetish fixation, which is nothing but a reflection of the world inside of the filmmaker himself. The singular feminine upsets everything, she, coming from Paris, disturbs the residents of the countryside, and, in spite of being a maid, dazzles servitude as well as bourgeois, being exemplary the scene of her awakening jealousy and annoyance in the lady of the home for using perfume, something that neither she, aristocrat, usually does. Returning to this theme, it is one of the films in which he most clearly portrays some of his eternal obsession themes, his fetishes, his incorrigible weakness, the female legs, of Jeanne Moreau this time, while the old patriarch fondles her calves, and in his book My last breath, tell us the director: "I have always been sensitive to women's walking, as well as to their gaze. In The Diary of a Chambermaid, during the booty scene, I had a real pleasure in making her walk and filming her. When she walks, her feet trembles slightly on the heel of the shoe. Disturbing instability. Wonderful actress, I limited myself to follow her, hardly correcting her. She taught me about the character things that I did not suspect "; it is not difficult to notice that Rabour in this case is dressed as Buñuel's alter ego, admiring her walking in a room. Yes, he pours, as usual, the filmmaker in his film, we notice his personality, his personal images, and in that sense the fetishist filmmaker is freer than ever in another of his quintessential figures, the feet, the feet of the Moreau, now coming to the detail of the booties, the old collector; he revels as has not been seen before in portraying his foot fetish. Then we will see the old Rabour, inert in his bed, but clinging tightly to the booties, a delirium that the filmmaker allows himself; the fetish of the shoes even acquires another aspect to be the key to discover the murder. Looms again as well the hobby of the entomologist, hobby that certainly shared with Carrière, in the form of a butterfly that is liquidated with bullets, or ants that flow in a garden; Buñuel's winks never fail, and they turn coherent and recognizable his cinema.

The director draws us a terrible portrait of the bourgeois, racist and fascist, not in vain changed the setting of the book, to take it to the twenties of the twentieth century, the interwar period in which totalitarian regimes arose, right-wing extremists, anti-Semitism, the director offers a look at some topics that he knew first-hand. Buñuel directs his very acid look towards bourgeois morality, which for him was always immoral, and that because everyone portrayed has defects, some severely despicable, the director does not leave a puppet with a head, his portrait is corrosive and bitter; it is a parade of miseries of the bourgeoisie, his look is hopeless, as actually many times he left patent in his films. Lustful, liars, anti-Semites, pedophiles and murderers, bitter vision of humanity, formerly in The Exterminating Angel (1962), was in urban bourgeois, now in country bourgeois. This is crowned in the twisted love of the maid and the criminal, he is a murderous pedophile, and she, knowing that, accepts him not as a lover, but as a companion, and he, almost as if replying, also seduces Marianne by his way. Singular moment is when Céléstine and Joseph consummate their intention of marriage, then in the dark, in bed, she exhorts him disturbingly to admit that he raped and killed the girl, there are certain details that make her disturbing. She is an upstart, is a weathervane, Machiavellian, flirt with everyone and marries an older man without hesitation to improve her condition, finally has an uncertain outcome, as the black stormy clouds eventually strengthen. Symbolically, Joseph, the most despicable of all, shielded himself in the army, in religion, law, order, country, in some other pillars of society, and she, unlikely, kisses him and accepts his carnal offer. The characters are typically buñuelian, although Manichaeism does not appear with all the vigor of other opportunities, they are complex characters, some not completely bad or good, especially her, and it is something that the filmmaker considered could harm the acceptance of the public, there is no figure with which they can fully identify. Thus, we have significantly the priest advising abstention, there should be no pleasure in marital relations, to avoid it, he tells to Mrs. Monteil, the languor and sexual neutrality of her collides with the express libidine of her husband. We have a remarkable sequence, without words, portrays the most despicable action, Joseph is mean, abject, outrages and kills the girl, Buñuel is a master talking to us, suggesting, narrating with images, and it will be another one of those memorable images, the bleeding legs of the girl, with snails moving to pachydermic rhythm for them, suggesting the vileness that has happened, and the time the corpse has been there. To a lesser extent there is the scene of love, again without words, the intercourse of Céléstine and Joseph is given to understand in the dark. The sisters of Buñuel asserted how clear they could appreciate the director's life, childhood embodied in the film -something ineluctable for the connoisseur of Buñuel's work-, among other things, for those snails, an image of the director's childhood, and likewise in his bestiary, a boar and a rabbit are now added. In the film there is no surrealism, it is a conventional feature, a thorny portrait of country bourgeois, in which relegated the political part of the original book, not saving though the end of that "Viva Chiappe!", vindicating his particular revenge against the right-wing who vetoed The Golden Age. The return to Europe finally takes place, new directions open to the already mature director, his film is formally one of his best works, stands out as always directing his actors -even speaking with a certain warmth of the French actress Muni-, the Iberian director was ready to give the best of his art.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) - Luis Buñuel

Buñuel continues with his cinematic evolution, technique, style, obsessions, everything that makes the cinema of the spaniard so differentiated and appreciable continues there, some of those elements are already taking the final form that the artist will wear in his final films, when the return to European industry finally occurs. Buñuel, as he had been doing in recent films in the early sixties, does not adapt literary stories to the cinema, but he himself elaborates the script, in collaboration with an old acquaintance, the great Luis Alcoriza returns to form again the famous duo of director and screenwriter. In this film can be noticed, as usual, the main winks and seals of his cinema, particularly you can notice echoes of his previous films, almost as a compendium of some of those elements of his audiovisual language. Calanda's genius introduces us to the singular and delirious story of a group of bourgeois, well-off individuals who after going to the opera, go to the house of one of them for dinner, finding themselves with the surprise that without major reasons, they simply can not leave from the living room of that house, they are unable to left, having to coexist in situations that are already challenging the socially permissible, until they find the way out of the singular cloister. Film one hundred percent Buñuel, one of his best known works, no doubt.

              

In a residence, the servants retire, an elegant bourgeois meeting is about to take place, remaining, as servant, only Julio, the steward (Claudio Brook). Then the lords of the house arrive, Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal), and Lucía (Lucy Gallardo), accompanied by a copious group, all dined with a bit of improvisation, being among the guests Leticia 'La Valkiria' (Silvia Pinal), and the brothers Francisco Avila (Xavier Loyá) and Ana Maynar (Nadia Haro Oliva). Without noticing, the dinner is over, no one retires, they stay for the night, the next morning arrives, they still do not leave, they have breakfast, being the first to suspect that something strange is happening the Doctor Carlos Conde (Augusto Benedico), nobody is capable of leaving the hall of the mansion. The locked ones are desperate, outside, people know that something is happening but they are also unable to enter the residence; water and food are scarce, some get sick, calm is lost and expletives begin to abound, fights, blows, dementia appears. When they are even thinking about liquidating each other, finally Leticia tries to recreate exactly the circumstances and positions of everybody before everything happened, and indeed, then they can finally leave the residence. Already outside, the bourgeois go to a mass, and where no one can leave the church now, while there are shootings in the street.

Coherently the director continues his cinematography, we will see many references to his previous representations, which are already approaching his final form, the refined and sophisticated surrealism of the final stage of his career. We have, among other images, the man grabbing the woman's buttocks, as in The Golden Age (1930), the dead hand we saw in A Chien Andalou (1929), just to mention some examples of his figures from previous films; as happened in the immediately previous Viridiana (1961), we find an abundant compendium that covers many of his famous recreations, the filmmaker, already mature, seems to look back on his work, reflect a bit on what was done previously. Even some curious image we will see of the traditional hen of the director, in the form of chicken legs in a bag, a detail that for the one who writes recalled some segment of his colleague, the great Carlos Saura. In that respect, certainly, as the director himself said, this film is almost like a continuation, or extension of The Golden Age, with delirium and dreamlike dementia in the middle of a lavish bourgeois meeting, a character even sums it up: "life is funny, and strange", strange as the circumstances of the film, but fun if you simply live without thinking about explanations. The traditional Buñuelian bestiary will add two new members in this work, a bear cub and lambs, who will surreally walk through the elegant rooms of the bourgeois mansion. And of course, the quintessential element of almost every Buñuelian film flows, total surrealism, which gives freedom, it is absurd the crux of the matter, humans unable to leave a room, ridiculous, the dementia is emerging, because everyone would have preferred go "to his house or a brothel" instead of being in that situation, it is unlikely the mishap, or perhaps too normal, affirms another character, playing with the unreality we witness. It is a micro universe, another space and time seem to have been generated there, and strikingly, outside people cross a similar situation, they are not able to enter the mansion, concreting the Spanish a cinema in minimum spaces, similar to what Hitchcock did in Lifeboat (1944), or the first Polanski exercises, with the natural distances from one artist to another, a relatively new topic in the director.

He leaves aside his more traditional topics the director, now he is interested in something a little more sophisticated, his already wielded topic of the human facing extreme situations, like the father Nazario in Nazarín (1959), as the nun Viridiana in Viridiana, we see it here but led to a more violent rupture with society, with the civilization, instead of a rupture of religious origin, like those, with the freedom that the dreamlike tints of the film allow. While the journey, however, is different, the destination is simile for all of them, extreme experiences that violently break their inner principles, which will destroy them, although the guests of The Exterminating Angel have final rescue, just as implausible as the way they arrived to the cloister; again, the freedom of surrealism allows it. In the unthinkable confinement the social conventions are lost, the film is a singular social, psychological experiment, a study, the masks that every human being learns when it comes to being inserted into civilization fall, the socially acceptable habits disappear, the human beings are stripping their interiors to the most basic instincts and actions, which will lead to destruction. The civilized things disappear, the death threatens, murder, a descent to the most primitive, dignity vanishes, what emerges then is destruction, human social conventions are erased, the filmmaker asserted that this was a work of rather historical-social nature, his versatility is shown. The topic is brutal, without major reasons, and perhaps that is why the result is more powerful, humans are faced with an extreme situation that will gradually bring them closer to madness. Little by little the frivolities, the gossips, the vulgar romances appear, the ill-conceived defects of the bourgeoisie appear, the indiscretions, somewhat disturbing details, like the brothers who have a relationship that dangerously borders on incest. Even the way someone combs her hair upsets someone else, the conflict is imminent, in this film which prefigures what we would later see in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), the surrealist delirium surrounded by bourgeois, their divertissement turns into a nightmare here, though, all strongly sprinkled of the very nourished gallery of visual, thematic and stylistic resources in the filmmaker's language, at this point already quite fine-tuned.

Buñuel claimed that he regretted certain circumstances of this shooting, he said that he would have liked to shoot the film with more elegant actors, said this in turn that he admired Visconti and the overwhelming simplicity and visual beauty in his films; Buñuel wished he could try to film something as beautiful as the Italian, but he needed resources that the Aztec film industry and land could no longer provide, Buñuel missed Europe, and in fact, the moment was getting closer, the refinement of the Europeans was something that was not too far away to be given. He also claimed that he wanted to take the picture to much more extreme levels, he thought that the bounded ones reach the final resort of cannibalism to ensure survival, something that unfortunately (or maybe not so much), he did not manage to realize, he missed the full freedom of other exercises, probably the one of the then recently made Viridiana, whose shooting said the Aragonese that was probably in which he felt with the greatest of liberties. Technically the filmmaker already has expertise with the camera, gained with the not few years of work in Mexican land, that camera, as in the other films of the late fifties and early sixties, behaves with subtlety, serenity, precision, with elegance introduces us and approaches both the characters and their actions, but in turn will also make use of close-ups, detail plans to generate closeness, hermeticism. Likewise, music is dispensed with, total absence of musical accompaniment, only diegetic sounds flow, which certainly helps to increase that suffocating sensation of hermeticism, in which Buñuel is curiously allowed to perform some repetition, literally repeats some sequence in the final assembly, like the toast a character makes at the beginning, as an extension of that site, that house where there seems to be another dimension. In the same way, the black and white of the film positively collaborates to generate a feeling of confinement, of cloister, and this, coupled with the diegetic sounds as the only auditory accompaniment, ends up giving shape to that hermeticism that oozes the movie. The most visually surreal of the film we see in diners losing sanity, their inner demons emerge, and dream, appreciating overlayed frames. In the film, and as in almost all spaniard movies, we see people and their frustrations, their unfulfilled desires, the lovers of The Golden Age and their frustrated carnal idyll, the bourgeois of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and their lunch that can not be given, desires that can not be concreted, another Buñuelian constant here is given in another variant, again bourgeois, who want to leave a room and can not, you do not need more in the film. Symbolically, it is the doctor, representative of the rational, reason, who first suspects what is happening, then always calls for calm, trying to make logic prevail. And finally, as this simple circumstance was engendered, so simple comes the long-awaited solution, without major complications or explanations, just as surreal as the situation lived, and we have that ending, with religious light-wink, the nightmare will repeat, now the lambs are in the street while uniformed men make shots, sequence and symbolism to outcome. One of the most recognized works of the filmmaker, simplicity and surrealism, a film that carries almost all the guidelines of its author, and abounds in details of his cinematographic language, a very Buñuel picture, a very enjoyable and appreciable feature, while looming the top moment of his filmography.