‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ Review: Radu Jude Dissects Bourgeois Rot Through Formal Mischief and Corrosive Irony [A] Cannes

Octave Mirbeau’s seminal 1900 novel, The Diary of a Chambermaid, has been adapted for the screen five separate times: by M. Martov in 1916, Jean Renoir in 1946, Luis Buñuel in 1964, Benoît Jacquot in 2015, and, now, Radu Jude, premiering at the 2026 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. Anyone acquainted with Jude’s unruly, essayistic cinema — particularly Dracula and I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians — will hardly expect a faithful literary transcription. His Chambermaid is, instead, a thoroughly contemporary provocation, less interested in preserving Mirbeau’s text than in using it as a diagnostic instrument with which to probe the hypocrisies and neuroses of the present day.

In typical Jude fashion, the protagonist first appears by drifting into the frame’s center from its margins, though this time she steps not into provincial decay but onto a gleaming, tree-lined boulevard where polished trams glide through the background with antiseptic efficiency. Gianna (the marvelous Ana Dumitrașcu) is a migrant domestic worker who has left her daughter, Maria (Sofia Dragoman), in the care of her grandmother Bunica (Liliana Ghiță) back in Romania while she works for the Donnadieu family abroad in Bordeaux, France. The film unfolds over the days leading up to Gianna’s planned return home for the holidays, with the encounters therein accumulating one by one with the quiet socioeconomic inequalities of someone whose labor extends beyond the limits of the workday itself.

Already in the opening scene, Gianna is pestered by a beggar, and the irony is difficult to miss: a disadvantaged local asserting entitlement over a migrant laborer scarcely higher on the social ladder herself. She is on her way to collect little Louen (Louen Bouteiller), who insists on calling her Jeanine — a sly nod to the novel’s Monsieur Rabour. When the boy recounts an encounter with school bullies, Gianna dismisses it with a weary “that’s life,” a phrase that lands not so much with cruelty but simply depletion. Later, alone in the kitchen chopping vegetables, she mutters in Romanian that he is a spoiled brat. Jude is exquisitely attentive to these private fissures between performance and resentment, affection and obligation.

Maria is Jude’s most substantial invention, and also his clearest intervention into the contemporary moment. Through the recurring video calls between mother and daughter, the film reveals the emotional asymmetry at the center of globalized care work. The nine-year-old grows increasingly resentful that Louen receives the maternal attention denied her, and here Jude locates the defining contradiction of his heroine: Gianna repeatedly promises Maria she will ask to be relieved of her childcare duties even as she continues performing them, quietly and without protest. The film understands that exploitation today rarely announces itself through overt brutality; more often, it disguises itself as professionalism, sacrifice, or necessity.

The sexual predation that coursed through Mirbeau’s original novel has likewise been recalibrated for the post-#MeToo era. In her spare time, Gianna rehearses for a theatrical adaptation of The Diary of a Chambermaid mounted by the literary department of a local university. Naturally, Jude pushes the premise toward absurdism. Because the production cannot afford an intimacy coordinator, Gianna and her co-star, Kalil (Arnaud Baudoin), are forbidden from making physical contact, even during a sex scene: she thrusts against a broom while he bounces separately on a bed nearby. The gag is broad, but the target is precise — a culture so consumed by procedural correctness that human behavior begins to resemble bureaucratic choreography.

The audience inside the Théâtre Croisette responded most thunderously to a dinner-party sequence hosted by the Donnadieus, in which the host, Pierre (Vincent Macaigne), descends into a furious argument over the war in Ukraine, accusing one guest of being a Putinist before abruptly turning to Gianna and demanding her opinion. She deftly evades the question, understanding that ideological candor is a luxury unavailable to those whose livelihoods depend upon remaining agreeable. Another enormous laugh arrived during the October 18 diary entry, which consists solely of a stationary shot of a weed-choked field. Jude’s humor has always carried a caustic intellectual charge; his punch lines reverberate because they expose systems rather than merely individuals.

Like Mirbeau before him, Jude dissects bourgeois rot through formal mischief and corrosive irony, though he does so for an age of migrant precarity, performative liberalism, and atomized labor. The methods differ, as does the medium, but the instinct remains the same: to reveal a society’s moral decay not through grand revelations, but through the banal rituals by which people justify themselves every day.

Grade: A

This review is from the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.