DVD of the Week: “The Diary of a Chambermaid”

Jean Renoir had planned an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel, about the romantic entanglement—upstairs and down—of a young woman in domestic service to a wealthy aristocratic family in late-nineteenth-century France, from the early days of his directorial career in the silent era. By the time he managed to make the movie, “The Diary of a Chambermaid” (which I discuss in this clip) in 1946, events in France had overtaken it and put the battle of the sexes in second place to the battle of nations and ideologies, to war itself. Renoir, who had left France in 1940 at the time of the German invasion, made the movie in Hollywood, with an illustrious cast that included Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith, and infused it with the political conflicts of the day. Remarkably, that’s what Mirbeau himself had done. Here’s the edition of the novel (in French) that appeared in 1900, in the midst of the Dreyfus affair. In the novel, Joseph, the valet—whom Renoir films as a stand-in for collaborators with the Nazi occupation—is a vehement anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfus agitator:

He is a member of the Young Anti-Semites of Rouen, a member of the Senior Anti-Semites of Louviers, and also a member of an infinity of groups and subgroups … When he speaks of Jews, his eyes have a sinister shine, his gestures have sanguinary ferocity … And he never goes to the city without a truncheon: “As long as there’s a single Jew left in France, our work is undone.” And he adds: “Oh, if I were in Paris, good God! I’d kill ’em! I’d burn ’em! I’d disembowel the damned kikes!”

Mirbeau’s novel was depressingly prescient—and Renoir’s film all the more depressingly documentary.