Diary of a Chambermaid
Obstinate Epistemologies
Luis Bunuel’s films are often both limpid and obscure, clearly focused and hard to fathom. In some of his work, this can be associated with his interest in a Surrealist streak that never quite left him, even if it was most evident in the early work, and at the height of the movement, as Bunuel made Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or with Salvador Dali in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Those early films were so openly inexplicable that they resisted meaning and invited symbolic analysis, perhaps not too far removed from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. But Diary of a Chambermaid and a number of other Bunuel films from the 50s and 60s (El, Nazarin, Viridiana, and Belle de Jour) are more comprehensible on the surface. They are less symbolically obscure than narratively explicable, yet possess an indeterminacy we cannot quite register. To synopsise those two early works with Dali would quickly lead the reader to recognise narrative chaos, but Diary of a Chambermaid, based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau, and already adapted by Jean Renoir in 1946, could be clearly described. A woman from Paris, Celestine (Jeanne Moreau), takes a job in the countryside in the 1920s and finds various men there lusting after her. Eventually, she marries one of them. That is the barest-boned story, but a fleshier synopsis would include that one of these suitors is married to the lady of the house, a second her father, Monsieur Rabour, a third a Fascist who works on the estate, and the fourth, the former military man she will marry, Captain Mauger. Yet the film perhaps hinges most pertinently on one detail that is of little importance to the plot, but central to Bunuel’s ongoing interest in fetishism (which we will address later), and another that transforms the story itself, even if hardly anyone in the film except Celestine reacts to it. In the latter instance, a young peasant girl, Claire, who hangs around the estate, is raped and murdered by the Fascist groundsman Joseph. The killing happens halfway through the film and changes Celestine’s trajectory. Rabour has just died, and Celestine’s job as his chambermaid is no longer pertinent. But, before getting on the train, she hears that the young girl has been murdered, and returns to the house where she is re-employed. None of this need be confusing or irrational. Celestine was fond of the girl, suspects Joseph, and tries to find out more so that he will be arrested for the crime. Bunuel offers all this with no sense of mystery. The viewer knows what has happened as the director has shown us Joseph going into the woods to murder Claire, and nobody else seems interested in the young girl to care if the murder is solved or not.
If the surrealist works can be so obscure that no categorical meaning can be extracted from them, Diary of a Chambermaid is so clear that almost no plot can be extracted from it, the very plot that is usually engineered out of a murder. Here, there are no suspects because nobody else is really interested, and Bunuel has shown us straight away who did it. The closest to suspense in the film rests on Celestine finding a way to expose Joseph’s crime, but Bunuel doesn’t suggest she is at much risk herself as she does so. We have a film that is easy to summarise and yet devoid of the narrative tensions that such a story would usually insist upon.
One way of understanding Bunuel’s reluctance to narrativise a story that in synopsis offers plenty of opportunity for suspense and mystery, rests on his relationship with objects, one that we can claim is more psychoanalytic than narrational; more about minds than deeds, thoughts over actions. Raymond Durgnat may have been right when saying, in the late 1990s, that it was time to ‘De-Freudianize’ Bunuel, as though Freud was too bourgeois to be useful, certainly too overused in Bunuelian criticism, and also constantly referenced in Durgnat’s own earlier work on the director. However, this was because there needed to be more emphasis on social materialism and functionalism, on understanding the importance of Marx as a way of undermining certain Freudian claims that were underpinned by bourgeois assumptions. To explore this would take us somewhere else, but Durgnat’s remark that ‘‘Bunuel’s films seem ‘strange’ by contrast with certain ‘bourgeois cultures,’ particularly the highly specialised ones, like Hollywood movie conventions, political party lines, and latterly, ‘political correctness,’’’ (Cineaste) is potentially very useful.
Durgnat is talking about received opinion, and whether it is Hollywood, traditional politics or identitarianism, they can all be comprehended through a prism Bunuel resists. If we were to turn the film into a work of such convention, we might say the chambermaid goes to the countryside, manipulates the wealthy, exposes Joseph’s crimes, marries one of the rich and turns the community into one of progressive over regressive policies, as a woman takes control, the bourgeoisie are undermined, and the murderer captured. Yet things don’t quite work out that way. Celestine will help get Joseph arrested and will marry a wealthy man. But Joseph will soon enough be released as Mauger isn’t so very different from Joseph when he sympathises with the man’s politics, and reckons Joseph won’t spend much time in jail. There isn’t any evidence. We see Celestine lying in bed as he says this, living a life of relative luxury but in a state of far greater unease than when she was the servant of her husband’s neighbours. Shortly afterwards, the film cuts to a port and the proletariat and the lower-bourgeoisie are marching. They are proclaiming ‘down with foreigners’, and their banner insists France is for the French. The film shows us Joseph, now a bit older and with the cafe he always wanted to own, also chanting. Celestine may have sought in her own small way social change, as she wanted justice for Claire and a better life for herself. Yet the change will be closer to Fascism than amelioration, even if France escaped that fate except under occupation, while Bunuel had to leave Francoist Spain. The point is that the times they are a- changin’, and Bunuel proposes that a maid’s small attempt at justice is weak next to her own social gain.
This doesn’t at all make Celestine a hypocrite, as though she convinced herself that she went back to the village to expose Joseph, but was really wangling better opportunities for herself. It is instead that people don’t care when Joseph isn’t useful as a scapegoat. Celestine understandably sees injustice and expects social condemnation, and assumes they will come together in Joseph’s arrest. When the captain tells her that he will be freed after his arrest because there isn’t enough evidence, there is no sense, as he says this, that Joseph isn’t guilty; more, that it doesn’t really matter. He wouldn’t be a very useful scapegoat, as though a stray act of sexual abuse and murder isn’t very galvanising, and better to pick on others who might be more innocent,but who can be collectively abused. The important thing isn’t the degree of criminality, but the magnitude of anger that can be conjured up against those who will be regarded as beyond the nationalist pale. When the captain acknowledges that Joseph may have done it, and doesn’t seem much to care, we see on Celestine’s face that look of disquiet. Mauger speaks about it when Celestine asks, and it comes just after the captain says he has seen the notary and changed his will, clearly in Celestine’s favour. This seems to interest her less than the case, and the captain says that when he saw the notary about his own affairs, the notary told him that Joseph should be fine. If Celestine is out for herself, this scene undermines such a claim.
Just after that look on Celestine’s visage, as the film cuts to the film’s closing scene, we hear the chants against foreigners. From a certain perspective, much of Bunuel’s later work rests not on the freedom of the unconscious that surrealism sought, but on the mind’s deep stubbornness when sedimented by many years of convention. So often, we see blind habit overcoming change, no matter the incongruity presented to the characters. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, nothing will stop them trying to get dinner, no matter the difficulties that start with various places having no food on the menu, to army manoeuvres and terrorist actions taking place while they try to eat. They remain unfazed as their attempts continue. In That Obscure Object of Desire, the central character sees one Conchita while the viewer sees two (played by different actresses), but Mathieu remains unable to distinguish between them as long as he can convince himself that he plays his role and they play theirs. Terrorism turns up again (both are 70s films), and in the conclusion, the only thing that can destroy his intractable and limited subjectivity is his annihilation. Mathieu gets blown up in a shopping arcade, still fussing obsessively over Conchita. Bunuel isn’t proposing the terrorists are right, and they get no more respect in his work than the police, clergy or other forms of power. It is more absurd than celebratory: nothing short of a bomb will impact on Mathieu’s thinking.
Perhaps one reason why Bunuel so often puts the potentially transformative in the background, or absurdly in the foreground, rests on an epistemological obstinacy, one that suggests that whether it is political conservatism, radicalism, or religious faith, none of them finally matter very much next to habit. Religion is a common element in his work, of course: Madame Monteil here, the central character in Nazarin, the one who poses as a gardener in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the ascetic Simon in Simon of the Desert, the various religious figures the pilgrims meet in The Milky Way. Yet Bunuel would probably agree with David Hume that, as Gil Morejon notes, thinking is ‘‘neither immediately conscious nor even readily available to conscious reflection: the mind passes from one idea to another on the basis of mental habits that are formed unconsciously, those habituated ideal passages are unconsciously and involuntarily followed, and even direct reflection on them does not clearly reveal the logic of ideal passage or the mechanisms of thinking.’’ Morejon adds, ‘‘There are no beliefs that do not involve these unconscious habits of thought; and Hume argues that nearly every movement of the mind is a matter of belief, rather than knowledge. In short, habits, which are ubiquitous, turn out to be mostly unconscious.’’ (‘The Gravity of Ideas: The Unconscious of Habit in Hume’)
Such a claim can help us to understand better much of Bunuel’s work, and our initial remark that the director’s films are both limpid and obscure, with the limpidity evident in the smoothness of his aesthetic and storytelling, and the obscurity resting on a meaning that cannot immediately be extracted from the material, and, too, because storytelling so often implicitly proposes transformation. The story is potentially simple: a woman arrives in the provinces and sees the inertia in the family she works for, the desires of the men all around her, and the brutal Fascism most manifest in Joseph, who goes on to kill the young girl. A transformative narrative would have the inertia energised by her presence, Joseph jailed for the crime, and Fascism in retreat as people can see that nobody who was screaming more loudly for it than a sexual predator. Celestine could leave the environment or marry into it, but in each instance, it would have been galvanised by her presence. Instead, the inertia is stronger than this galvanisation. Rather than a transformative narrative, we have an absorbent milieu that refuses change because the unconscious and the habitual come together. Nothing is forceful enough to escape predictable thinking or conventional environments.
Perhaps one reason why impulses and perversions have so much place in Bunuel’s films rests on the notional freedom they provide, with a conservatism that cannot be removed. Surrealism’s point rested on the unconscious becoming liberated. In contrast to Dadaism, ‘‘which deliberately defied reason’’, ‘‘surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression,’’ (Encyclopedia Britannica), with Andre Breton saying, in 1924, that it wanted to stretch the possibilities of thought by rejecting the narrowness of positivist reasoning that limits thought’s capacity: ‘‘the law of the lowest common denominator finally prevails upon them.’’ (‘The Surrealist Manifesto’) Reasoning isn’t the height of thought, but its diminished state. Louis Aragon saw surrealism could be extended to the socially and politically radical: ‘‘it is a means of total liberation of the mind, and of all that resembles it. We are determined to make a Revolution.’’ (‘Declaration of the Bureau de Recherches Surrealistes’)
However, what if the unconscious is even more reactionary than consciousness, so that when you dig deep, you don’t find liberatory desires but habitual expectations? This is what Bunuel finally took from the movement, and thus often focused on conservatively-inclined or bourgeois characters, then emphasised an impulse or perversion that registered less a revolutionary unconscious than an aberrant one. It is then a question of innocent or culpable aberrations. In El, the central character has a foot fetish that is extended here in Monsieur Rabour’s boot fetish, while Severine in Belle de Jour likes the idea of violation in theory, while the film dissolves into indeterminacy as we wonder if she likes it in practice. A couple in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie enjoy getting their hair and clothes mussed up, having sex in the bushes, while in Viridiana, there is foot fetishism aplenty. It thus falls under the innocent (no matter the central character’s mad jealousy in El), while Joseph here, the lover in Belle de Jour, the torturer in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, are all culpable perverts, criminally perverse, if you like.
Raymond Durgnat summed up Bunuel’s philosophy thus: ‘‘the imagination is private and harmless, and so can be morality-free; but one’s behavior must follow one’s moral principles; so liberty means self-discipline.’’ (Cineaste) When Monsieur Rabour dies holding the boots he wished Celestine to wear, this is potentially far more embarrassing than Joseph’s terrible deed, but it is also innocent, and well within Bunuel’s moral remit. There is no violation, while Joseph’s act is the extreme example of it. At the end of the film, Joseph will be a proud cafe owner and a racist, clapping and cheering happily as people march for xenophobia. Whatever contempt Bunuel may have for such a character, though, isn’t manifest in narrative form. The point of villainy in most films is that the person is there to be caught, but Bunuel lets him wriggle free because his point isn’t to show that justice will be done. It is instead that injustice will become manifold: a spreading hatred that Joseph has practised in its most violating form, and others will continue it without necessarily murdering anyone in particular, but will persecute more broadly.
If Bunuel believes that there is a world of a difference between the private fetish and the public crime, between someone infatuated with feet and someone who insists on violating the rights and bodies of others, then how does he make this critique clear as another filmmaker would by simply punishing Joseph? From one perspective, Joseph is found no more guilty than Monsieur Rabour; from another he is more culpable than many a caught villain. This rests, of course, on Joseph’s broader beliefs, where killing a peasant girl is just part of a brutal sensibility that disparages immigrants in the most derogatory of terms. If Joseph had been found guilty, that would be a just ending within an unjust beginning – the Fascism that would become central to Europe for much of the decade and beyond, and which led to Bunuel’s exile, living and working during the 1940s and 1950s in the US and Mexico. Bunuel may have said, ‘‘I’ve never been one of Franco’s fanatical adversaries,’’ but his involvement in the Republican government, and in making propaganda films for it, wasn’t going to make his life easy when the nationalists won the Civil War. The Diary of a Chambermaid may have been made in France, but its ending echoes other European countries that turned more directly to Fascism.
This is one way to understand Bunuel’s film: that he is willing to forego narrative resolution all the better to indicate symptomatic despair. Rather than the just ending that sees Joseph imprisoned, the director offers the broader injustice of Joseph as a free man, and able to propagate extreme beliefs. Yet while this would be one way of countering convention, he also does it in the form, even if this leads to a potential paradox. Bunuel’s camera is as fluidly revealing as Hitchcock’s, but while the English master’s fluidity usually made for a categorical response in the viewer, Bunuel often plays up ambivalence and ambiguity. When Hitchcock shows us keys on a table in Notorious, or the necklace in Vertigo, these are moments where the viewer understands both the workings of plot and the motivations of character. The close-up works like an exclamation mark. Bunuel’s equivalent close-ups work like question marks. In one scene, Celestine breaks a precious lamp’s globe. It comes not long after Madame Monteil asks if she breaks things, and Celestine insists she doesn’t, and just after Madame Monteil tells her that it is important she doesn’t damage the globe while cleaning it, otherwise someone will have to get a replacement from England. It of course breaks, and while Celestine doesn’t smash it deliberately, it doesn’t feel like an accident either. Bunuel cuts from the table as Celestine’s elbow catches the object, and it then falls and lies shattered on the ground. The cut and the camera movement add to our sense that Celestine’s subconscious is more than happy to destroy the things Madame Monteil has so patronisingly asked her to look after, but it hangs in the air as an ambivalent motive and contingent event. It thus becomes a question.
We can think, too, of the way Bunuel films the deaths of both Monsieur Rebour and the little girl. He allows the camera rather than the characters to dictate the revelation, and it gives both moments, respectively, a comic and horrific ambiguity that would have been less pronounced if filmed differently. In the first, Monsieur Monteil and the priest try to break down the doors to Rebour’s chambers. The camera enters where the characters fail, as Bunuel’s camera glides around the bedroom before showing the dead Monteil holding the boots, all the while we hear, off-screen, the characters talking. They are outside, fretful about Rebour’s state. We are inside and amused by Rebour’s fetish obsession, perhaps wondering whether this is a love for the boots or a love for Celestine, and whether Monteil would be able to tell the difference.
In the second scene, Joseph is passing through the forest with his horse and cart before coming across the young girl collecting snails. They speak, and he goes on his way and the girl hers. He shouts after her to beware of wolves. After a few seconds, he stops the horse and dashes into the woods. The film then cuts to a predatory animal coming out of the forest as a rabbit scampers away. The film then cuts to a side elevation of Claire’s legs spread, the girl no longer alive, and the camera zeroes in on the snails that crawl on her dead body. Again nobody discovers the death; Bunuel allows the camera to show it without the perspective of a human being upon it. Just as this makes the first scene more comic, it makes the second more shocking, as though Bunuel can see in both an aspect of the human condition, and not only an instance of its humorousness or cruelty. The comment about wolves that will no doubt invoke in many Little Red Riding Hood, and also the cut to the beast and the rabbit, might even suggest a misplaced aestheticism on Bunuel’s part – as if he wanted to take further the metaphoric overtones in that brilliant moment in Fritz Lang’s M, when the ball rolls down the hill and we realise the little girl has been murdered. But Lang’s moment is substitutional, while Bunuel’s is augmentative. The ball has nothing to do with the girl’s death on a primitive level, while the beast and the rabbit share with the human the weak and the strong. In France, of course, snails are eaten as a delicacy, and so what Bunuel shows isn’t only the terrible tragedy, but also the power imbalance which can lead to Claire’s death in a system where all that matters is that strength wins. This is the very system on a political level Joseph promotes, and the viewer is inclined to see his behaviour not as aberrant, but consistent. While Rebour’s impulse leads to no more than dying with a pair of boots next to him in bed, Joseph’s murdering of Claire is an impulse grounded in the animalistic and reproduced in the political. That both events are presented from an absent human perspective, rather than in each instance a character’s, gives them the force of critique, the weight of a statement that isn’t easy to define but is undeniably being made.
It is often this relationship with the camera that gives Bunuel’s work its assertive inexplicability, leaving the characters behind so that he can explore the intricacies of his subject without being beholden to the story. He may often move the camera with the fluid detachment of Hitchcock, but the suspense maestro would usually do so all the better to generate anticipation in the viewer. Whether moving in on the money in Psycho, or retreating from the doorway and down the stairs in Frenzy, we infer very strongly what will happen next: Marion will steal the cash; a character is about to be murdered. When Bunuel elegantly leaves behind Celestine walking towards the carriage carrying flowers for Claire’s or Rebour’s funeral, there is nothing anticipatory about it, no idea in the viewer’s mind about what this detached perspective means. As Celestine moves around a tree in one direction, the camera moves around it in the other, with the film leaving Celestine in the middle distance next to the carriage. Bunuel moves the camera slightly forward as Celestine moves away from the carriage, and we hear a noise off-screen, a clunking sound. The camera then cuts to various objects landing on Rebour’s path, and we know it has been the captain, who has earlier tossed stuff across from his garden onto Rebour’s land. Nothing much comes of this, just another impulsive action that we might regard as innocent rather than criminal, and no proper escalation takes place. By the end of the film, the captain and Monsieur Monteil are friends, with Monteil no longer, it seems, the scoundrel the captain insisted he was near the film’s beginning.
What does this scene indicate? It shows that in Bunuel’s work, the camera’s purpose isn’t to push the story, but to enquire into the nature of the characters within it. It made sense that Henry Miller would see in the director an entomological aspect. Paul Begin notes, ‘‘the key to Miller’s insight is the comparison of the Spanish director to an entomologist. It is an analogy that certainly deserves attention, given the fact that an entomological flair has pervaded the cinema of Bunuel since his entry into filmmaking in1929 with Un chien andalou, which combines closeup images of an ant-covered hand with a death’s head moth through lap dissolves and cuts.’’ (Screen) Begin takes this literally; we are more inclined to see it as acertain type of gaze that shows Bunuel’s interest in how people live over what motivates their actions, with an interest less in the plots that develop than the habits that envelop, capturing people in worlds that are absurd rather than terrifying, banal rather than exciting. Appalling things may happen in Bunuel’s films (torture, brutality, grinding poverty and beatings that kill), and perhaps nothing more so than little Claire’s death here. However, they are all contained by an odd equanimity that asks us to see the human is an appallingly habitual creature, and also an impulsive one, but that neither one’s habits nor one’s peculiarities are likely to bring about much change. This might assume Bunuel is politically apathetic, yet it might instead indicate no more than that it isn’t enough to wish for a better system, but acknowledge first the problem of humans who will be responsible for making it. The film’s ending doesn’t at all indicate that the film sides with Joseph. However, it perhaps reckons that political possibilities rest on understanding the almost intractability of the habitual. What might be able to dislodge it is a question, and Bunuel’s style is all about the nature of this query, without feeling obliged to answer it too hastily.
© Tony McKibbin