Radu Jude doesn’t play by the rules. The Romanian filmmaker made a name for himself with Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, whose name is not the only way it’s crazy, and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which finished with a 40-minute unbroken take of a safety video being filmed. And those are just his MIFF films. He also made a nearly three-hour version of Dracula that defies description.

Just when you think Jude is behaving a bit more conventionally in The Diary of a Chambermaid, which is based on a 1900 novel by Octave Mirbeau, it turns out he has some surprises in store. Among these are cutaways to a stage version of the novel, which feel like out-of-context extended tangents, and an ending that seems … well, unresolved is a kind way to put it.

Actually there’s a textual explanation for the play, which is that the main character, a Romanian “chambermaid” (i.e. nanny/housekeeper) played by Ana Dumitrascu, has been acting in this play that eerily resembles her own existence. She’s working in Paris in order to send money back to her child and mother in Romania, whom she otherwise doesn’t get to see for months on end. Her employer, a bourgeois professional played by Melanie Thierry, has suggested the play as an outlet for Gianina’s mundane reality. Only, of course, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the immediate needs of Marguerite and her husband Pierre (Vincent Macaigne).

The story proceeds with a series of on-screen titles marking days in the three months between mid-September and Christmas, many of which involve the sort of workaday drudgery you might find in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (and it’s no coincidence that Chambermaid has a poster that echoes the advertising materials from Akerman’s film). However, there’s supposed to be a goal in sight, which is that Gianina will get to go back home and visit her increasingly perturbed daughter in time for Christmas. But if her employers’ passive-aggressive patterns of behaviour are any indication, that’s going to be a lot less of a simple prospect than it seems.

For a filmmaker you would not generally describe as “restrained,” Jude shows a lot of restraint in how he allows this satire of class relations to play out. A less clever filmmaker would have made Gianina’s employers monsters, or at least only fake nice. Jude gives us two parents who actually think they’re really benevolent people, with the dad even playing a bit of “good cop” toward Gianina when his wife has taken a “bad cop” tone. The indignities they subject her to are not what you would call grotesque, but they eat away at the woman’s sense of self-worth nonetheless. Meanwhile, the others indulge in the luxury of their own perspective of themselves as among the good ones.

And the really Jude moments? Well they do confront in the way you want. The staged bits showcase parts of Mirbeau’s novel that don’t have an obvious outlet in the story Jude has chosen to tell, such as the male employer in the novel being sexually obsessed by his chambermaid’s boots. Jude of course plays this scene out at a maximum volume and length until you’re sort of looking around you at the rest of the audience to figure out what’s going on – which is exactly Jude’s goal.

He does return to mostly straightforward documentation of Gianina’s three months of increasingly worse weather in Paris, but he’s got some shocking elements to spring on us near the end, including a head-scratching ending. It’s not head scratching because something weird happens; in fact, that would be very much within our normal range of expectations from a Jude movie. Instead, it’s because it doesn’t seem like this is where this story would logically end, and that there was an epilogue with some sort of ironic twist that they forgot to film.

Jude’s conclusion, however, does underscore just how much of a number Marguerite and Pierre – and more innocently, their son Louen (Louen Bouteiller) – have done on Gianina. Like pernicious upper class people the world over, they’ve made their subordinate feel happy to get whatever scraps she gets. It’s like they’re moving the goalposts and telling her they haven’t moved, and that she’s lucky to even have a goal to begin with.

 

The Diary of a Chambermaid has an encore performance this Saturday at 6:45 p.m. at Hoyts Melbourne Central. Tickets can be purchased here.