The Diary of a Chambermaid

SilentDawn4.0

80Chicago International Film Festival #7Impressive in its tonal balance between extrapolating on reality's inherent social imbalance and the vulgar ways in which we express our anger towards the universe. Felt every moment of Ana Dumitrascu's performance, what a show-stopper. Seems like this is a minor reset for Radu Jude judging from other responses - this is the first of his films that I've seen - but I was quite thrilled by it all the same. His rumination on the modern world takes us from a theater of hysteria and frustration to YouTube'd war footage and back again, with a central mother/daughter dynamic to keep us grounded.

jryn74.0

Watched as part of 2026 Chicago International Film Festival.I wasn’t able to get to a lot of movies at the festival this year and missed favorite directors like Ryusuke Hamaguchi -but I did get my Radu Jude in. And this year Jude presents the closest thing to a narrative film he’s done - and in a co-production with France too, so much of it’s in French. Here he riffs on the novel Diary Of A Chambermaid with the story of a Romanian migrant (Ana Dumitrașcu who was in his last year’s Dracula) working for a rich couple in Paris (Melanie Thierry and Vincent Macaigne) cleaning their house and basically raising their son. In her spare time she’s in rehearsals for a local amateur production of…Diary Of A Chambermaid. And all the while she has to FaceTime and send videos back and forth with her actual daughter back in Romania, being raised by her own mom while she’s in Paris trying to make money to keep their house. But she’s supposed to have time off at Christmas to go home to see her daughter…but as the days kept ticking off onscreen, the more nervous I got that somehow that would be derailed.You can dress Jude up with a bigger budget, French language, Parisian backdrops, and French stars, but Diary Of A Chambermaid still feels very much his work. He even brings along frequent star Ilinca Manolache as the director of the community play. His acid satire and dialogue are everywhere, along with long discussions between characters highlighting some hypocrisy or other. Jude expertly skews the rich liberal family here - in the most cringeworthy scene, they pull Dumitrașcu into a dinner party argument about the war in Ukraine as an authentic “person from the East” to win an argument. Their sympathies are shown to be inch deep, and their solution to everything is to throw money at it, which comes to a head at the ending. But Dumitrașcu‘s character doesn’t get off scotfree either; Jude is certainly sympathetic, but definitely takes time showing her shortcomings as well.As usual with Jude this is darkly funny stuff (and he still gets in sex jokes here and there). And as usual by the end, the laughter hurts.SIDE NOTE: This is the second time I’ve seen Macaigne recently, and the first time he was spoofing himself in the Call My Agent! movie. My whole view of him is very skewed now - I’ll have to see some of his other work.

coffee4.0

“We’ll get an intimacy coordinator, of course.””We don’t have room in the budget for that.”minor? perhaps, but by design and with full control behind the wheel. really great film, way better than i’d been told, funny and biting at basically every turn (the dinner table scene where they start watching Russian war footage is tremendous) even with how scattershot the structure can be. a more decisively clear look at The Way We Live Now than most who try the same. Ana Dumitraşcu is the prettiest woman i’ve ever seen