560 - Diary of a Chambermaid, United States, 1946. Dir. Jean Renoir.

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

560 - Diary of a Chambermaid, United States, 1946.  Dir. Jean Renoir.

Only weak people sit around under trees wishing for things.  It's better to do it yourself.

Celestine is talking to Captain Mauger, the master of the estate next door.  Captain Mauger has just sat under the wishing tree, wishing out loud that Celeste would come to Paris with him and marry him.

But Celestine, chambermaid to the Lanlaire estate, recently sat under the same tree and wished that the heir, Georges Lanlaire, would take her to Paris and marry her.

It is July 14, the day of the annual celebration in Paris--what the movie does not explicitly call Bastille Day--and the mistress of the estate, Madame Lanlaire, has give the servants an hour in town to participate in the festivities.

Celestine and her fellow servant, the scullery maid Louise, were going to come with the valet Joseph, but he has stayed behind and encouraged them to go with Captain Mauger instead.  Joseph wants Captain Mauger to be gone from his house so that Joseph can secretly enter it.  Tomorrow he is going to take Celestine to Paris and marry her, and he has Mauger's money to take now that the Lanlaire silver is no longer available to him.

If you are keeping count of how many men might wish to take Celestine to Paris and marry her, you may add to your tally the Captain himself, Georges' father.  He was the first one to make the offer.

In the beginning of our story, Celestine was riding the train from Paris, on her way to the country where the Lanlaire estate sits, preparing for her new job as their chambermaid.

While riding the train, she wrote in her diary.

May 15th
Today I am entering my new place, the twelfth in two years.  What is wrong with me?  I can certainly boast of having seen many houses and strange faces . . . and filthy souls.

We do not know what was wrong with her.  We never get to see the old Celestine at work.  Rather, we watch her transformed in the beginning of our movie, and we see the new Celestine from then on.

When she arrives at the station, Joseph meets her to pick her up.  He asks for her references and he asks to see her hands.  He is formal with her, and authoritative.  He behaves as if he might be her new boss.  But Celestine figures it out.  She has been in the servant business too long to fall for that trick.  And she noses him out for being the valet, just the valet, and nothing more.  (Valet is pronounce with a voiced final t.)

So when he tries the same trick on the new scullery maid Louise, who has also just arrived at the station--apparently disembarking from a different train car--Celestine refuses to take it.  Joseph rejects Louise based on her looks--she is plain--and tells her to take the train back to Paris.  Louise states that she does not have the money.  He tells her that is her problem.  So Celestine stands up for Louise and informs Joseph that if the scullery maid is not being accepted, then the chambermaid is quitting too.  Joseph walks to the wagon to consider it.  Celestine is very beautiful.  Joseph returns and accepts her demand.  He takes them both.

For the first time, Celestine has stood up for herself.  And she likes it.

She does it again when Joseph shows Celestine and Louise their bedroom, and it has only one bed.  Louise offers to sleep on the floor, but Celestine demands that Joseph get her another bed.

After he leaves, she makes her decision.  A life decision.  Celestine is going to be somebody.  Her own mistress.  Not a servant.  Not someone who takes orders.  But someone who gives orders.  She is going to find a master and get him to marry her.

So Celestine starts off on her new life's quest as a golddigger.

The first person she meets is Captain Lanlaire himself.  The master of the estate.  The boss.  Only she thinks he is the cook.  Partly because he comes and eats in the servants quarters.  We learn pretty quickly that Madame Lanlaire wears the pants in the house--even though she wears beautiful formal dresses and gowns.

Celestine goes after Captain Lanlaire, yet when she gets him to invite her to Paris, she says he is just like all the other masters--which gets us to infer why she went through twelve estates in two years.  And yet we see her in this case clearly instigate it.  She openly wants his money.

And when she discovers that none of the money is in Lanlaire's name, she immediately switches to next-door-neighbor Captain Mauger, who does have money, and she works her lures on him.  Despite his strangeness.  Mauger is a Rumpelstiltskin, a manic sprite who eats flowers and throws rocks through windows.  As he leaps and dances and throws, one expects him to start shouting "Ernest T. Bass!  Ernest T. Bass!"  Yet she happily goes after him when she thinks he has money.

Now we are here at the wishing tree, and Celestine is getting what she once wished for--the affection of a man of means--what seems all-to-easy for her to get from any man.  But something has happened in the mean time.

She has fallen in love.

For real.

Not for money.

We know this because she writes in her diary.

Georges.  Georges.  Georges.  Georges.  Georges.  Georges. Georges.  Georges.  Georges.

Georges is sick and may be dying.  And his time in Paris has left him disillusioned and cynical.  He has been away so long that Madame Lanlaire, the epitome of formal dignity, has practically thrust Celestine upon him by dressing her up in beautiful clothes and assigning to go on long walks with him.

It works, and Celestine sits under the wishing tree wishing for Georges, but Georges rejects her, or seems to, apparently not because he does not love her--he seems to love her very deeply--but because he is so overwhelmed by his feelings of hopelessness and futility.

The film is based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau, which was in turn adapted into a play by Andre Heuze and Thielly Nores.

The group of people who put the film together is really interesting.

Begin with Burgess Meredith.  You know him as Rocky's manager Mickey in the first three Rocky movies (1976, 1979, 1982).  He had a long and prolific career from the 1930s to the 1990s, and he established himself with his sixth film in the role of George in Lewis Milestone's version of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939).

Burgess Meredith wrote the screenplay and produced this film.  He also played the role of the leprechaun-like Captain Mauger.

For the beautiful leading lady Celestine, he hired his own real-life wife, the movie star Paulette Goddard.  Formerly married to Charlie Chaplin and his costar in Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1950).  Bob Hope's sidekick in The Cat and the Canary (1939) and The Ghost Breakers (1940).  She married rich, at 16, in real life, and would marry rich again in later life.

Dame Judith Anderson plays Madame Lanlaire.  Imagine her as the strange Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), or as Memnet in The Ten Commandments (1956), or as the Vulcan High Priestess in Star Trek III: Search for Spock (1984).  Here she is not the head of the servants but the head of the house, and she carries herself with pride and decorum--until she gets her breakdown scenes near the end--one with her son Georges, pleading with him to stay and to love her, and the other with the valet Joseph, giving up her silver, and her security, to his demands.

Francis Lederer plays Joseph.  He can be as stone-cold as Frankenstein's monster.  Tall and measured and stoic.  Celestine calls Joseph the Undertaker.  Joseph tells Celestine they are both the same.  That they look different on the outside, but inside they have the same heart.  He is right when it comes to her first persona.  They are both climbers, ruthless in their desire to take what they want in life.

Louise is played by none other than Irene Ryan, who would go on to play Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971).  How funny that yesterday while watching The Southerner (1945), we observed that Beulah Bondi's riding on the back of the truck in her rocking chair reminded us of Irene Ryan's doing it seventeen years later.  And then, here she is.

Jean Renoir films the movie with his typical brilliantly fluid, lyrical, and invisible camera movement. But he takes a departure from his usual realism.  Yes, he observes class hierarchies, and one cannot watch this film without thinking of life in the chateau in The Rules of the Game (1939).  But this one is a quirky comedy.  It does not take itself very seriously, and it is a bit screwball.

This allows for the mercenary chambermaid to be transformed by love rather quickly and conveniently, but as entertainment goes we can go along with it if we are willing.

So that she can write in her diary:

Forsaking all others
through sickness and health
for better or worse
till death do us part.

And we can cheer for her.