“Jude’s most conventional movie in quite a while, and through his abrupt editing and sharp dialogues also one of his funniest.”

If there is one man you can trust with making Octave Mirbeau’s classic French novel The Diary of a Chambermaid into a bittersweet Christmas movie, it’s Romanian enfant terrible Radu Jude. Surprisingly sticking to a relatively straightforward narrative structure, although devoid of any sort of formalism in his filmmaking still, Jude’s biting satire of the French bourgeoisie, in line with Mirbeau’s novel but modernized for the 21st century, has gotten the most laughs so far on the Croisette. Truth be told, the most walkouts too; Jude isn’t for everybody. Resting on the shoulders of Ana Dumitrașcu’s performance as an immigrant caught between politeness and disdain, Jude’s version of, or rather, as the opening title card informs us, ‘variation on’ The Diary of a Chambermaid should have those who ran for the hills after the chaos of Dracula coming back to the idiosyncratic Romanian master.

Gianina (Dumitrașcu) is a Romanian expat living in Bordeaux and working as a nanny for the upper middle-class Donnadieu family (Mélanie Thierry and Vincent Macaigne). She is trying to make enough money to be able to settle in France and have her young daughter come over. The Donnadieus treat her well enough, and the father especially is very lenient towards her, with a hint of sexual desire – but there are moments when Gianina, or as the children say, Janine, could damn them, kids included, to hell. In Romanian, of course, lest the family might understand the coarse curses she flings at them under her breath. For the parents, Gianina is a curiosity, the representation of Eastern Europe, as if all people from that side of Europe are the same. So when they have their lavish dinners with friends, obviously with copious amounts of wine (this is France, after all), Gianina is propped up to give her view on, say, the war in Ukraine from the perspective of an Eastern European. For months they have promised her that she can go home for Christmas and New Year’s, but an unfortunate accident with the father’s mother forces Gianina to stay in Bordeaux. Because the family giving up their annual ski vacation is unthinkable, of course.

Jude takes the diary part of the title literally, so the film is structured as a string of short segments and scenes that are dated from mid-September to Christmas Day. In a lot of these entries little happens; Gianina’s life is quite uneventful, but you have to put something in your diary. They often feature video calls with her foul-mouthed daughter (the girl is 10 years old, at most) and her equally cranky mother, as they slaughter a chicken or yell at each other. In most of these conversations the daughter pleads for Gianina to come home, despite her mother’s promises that it will be ‘soon’.

Other segments feature Gianina as an actress in rehearsals for a stage performance of Mirbeau’s novel, playing the titular chambermaid. The play, a project by the local literature faculty that is directed by Jude alumn Ilinca Manolache in a hilarious supporting part, is to be performed by amateurs, with an immigrant of Arabic descent playing all the male roles. It’s a big blow when an ignorant social media post by the production assistant leads to him being deported. Who is to play these roles now, seems to be the main concern, another not-so-subtle dig at how the French supposedly left-wing and open-minded intelligentsia views immigrants. Manolache’s director seems to be in Bobita mode (her character in Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World), so it’s safe to say that while the play retains much of Mirbeau’s fin-de-siècle language, the mise-en-scene is more… modern, let’s say.

The disparity of wealth between the Donnadieus with their (rather ghastly decorated) classical French apartment full of the mistress of the house’s ‘exotic trinkets’, and the dirt-poor Romanian countryside at the other end of Gianina’s phone shows that Jude leaves no prisoners, although the bulk of his satire is squarely aimed at the Foucault and Faulkner quoting pseudo-intellectuals that employ Gianina. His portrayal of the dumb, coarse hicks of Romania’s hinterlands is quite one-dimensional, but the way he fillets the French bourgeoisie, his dialogue dripping in acid, is delightfully precise. These are the supposedly ‘good people’, the progressives who ‘don’t see differences’ while they treat Gianina like a child and display their ignorance about other parts of the world left and right. In the midst of it all stands Dumitrașcu’s performance, a mixture of politeness that could be an act and frustration that definitely isn’t. The role is not as wild as Manolache’s aforementioned part in Do Not Expect Too Much… (then again, which role is?) or even Eszter Tompa in Kontinental ’25. Gianina is a more well-rounded character and Dumitrașcu imbues her with a range of conflicting emotions, from love for the two young children she takes care of (although the stories she tells the older boy are perhaps not suitable) to exasperation but also respect for the two parents. The Diary of a Chambermaid is Jude’s most conventional movie in quite a while, and through his abrupt editing (scenes often stop right when something important is about to happen or to be said) and sharp dialogues also one of his funniest.