Does a year ever feel truly complete without at least one Radu Jude cinematic provocation? Over the past few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it does not. Not every one of his films has been a home run, but there is an unslakable fire in Jude’s satirical proclivities that keeps us perpetually tantalized as viewers. The Diary of a Chambermaid does not break that streak, thankfully. Its tenor is certainly more subdued than some of his recent work, but the characteristic wry barbs that emerge from unexpected corners, his enduring fascination with mediated images, and his deft balancing of overt and understated observations on systemic inequality and its roots are all present and accounted for.
If the film’s title sounds familiar, it should. It is drawn directly from the 1900 Decadent novel by French writer Octave Mirbeau, which has itself been adapted several times, most notably by Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel. Much as he did with last year’s Dracula, however, Jude is not interested in offering a straightforward adaptation. Instead, he distills Mirbeau’s work to its essential concerns and transposes them into the present day, allowing its themes to acquire new resonance against the contradictions of contemporary life.
Portions of Mirbeau’s novel do remain in the film, however, through a clever contrapuntal subplot in which an amateur theatre troupe of first-time actors rehearses a stage adaptation of the book. It is here that the film’s titular chambermaid, Gianina (a superb Ana Dumitrașcu), a Romanian migrant worker, gets to inhabit Mirbeau’s mercurial Célestine while assuming a quieter, more deferential persona in the home of her bourgeois employers in Bordeaux. The conceit initially feels somewhat on the nose, but Jude gradually mines it for both humour and pathos as we learn more about Gianina’s circumstances, desires, and motivations.
Set over three months, from late September through Christmas, Jude follows Gianina through the rhythms of her daily grind: stage rehearsals, the mundane cleaning and cooking duties she performs for her employers, nannying their young son through games and fairy tales, and FaceTime calls with her own daughter in Romania. It is the latter that lends the film its greatest emotional sincerity. Gianina continually tries to placate her puckish daughter, who wants nothing more than for her mother to come home and resents the amount of time she now spends caring for another child. The scenes between Dumitrașcu and Sofia Dragoman, even when mediated entirely through a screen, possess a tenderness and naturalism that make their relationship feel wholly lived-in. So, too, does the film’s eventual crescendo into crisis feel earned rather than arbitrary: Jude has carefully calibrated the story’s incremental tensions, allowing the rupture to emerge organically from the seemingly mundane details that precede it.
As ever with Jude, there is plenty here to be angry about, even when ample opportunities arise to laugh or smirk. The social disparities that enraged Mirbeau more than a century ago remain stubbornly intact. Migrant workers are still beholden to the whims of those who employ them, even when exploitation takes the form of casual indifference rather than overt abuse. The selfish vanity of the wealthy, meanwhile, has hardly disappeared. Those deemed to occupy a lower social class are routinely treated as disposable, their lives rendered meaningful only insofar as they dutifully perform the services expected of them without complaint.
The technology may have changed, and Jude makes characteristically inventive use of its possibilities, but the underlying structures have not. Screens and smartphones may mediate our relationships differently now, yet the old cycles of power and subjugation continue largely undisturbed. In bringing Mirbeau’s century-old indictment into the present, The Diary of a Chambermaid demonstrates just how little some things have changed—and becomes another sharp, quietly devastating addition to Jude’s growing artistic arsenal of provocations.
The Diary of a Chambermaid had its North American premiere at TIFF in the Wavelengths programme on Saturday, September 19, 2026.
The Lonely Film Critic 