An exquisitely enigmatic Jeanne Moreau ("The Bride Wore Black") is the chambermaid Célestine, who takes a position with a decadent family on a pre-WWII Normandy estate and finds herself in the middle of a hotbed of hypocrisy and perversion. The old man has a foot fetish, his daughter is a frigid hysteric, her husband a dissolute rake, the gamekeeper a racist and sadist, while the fascist neighbor compulsively throws his garbage on their property. When a child is raped and murdered, Célestine becomes obsessed with discovering and exposing the killer, even though she finds herself attracted to him. Adapted from the Octave Mirbeau novel by cinema’s grand surrealist and satirist of the bourgeoisie, Luis Buñuel ("Belle de Jour"), "Diary of a Chambermaid" exerts a hypnotic fascination with the erotic while striking out against human hypocrisy and moral decay. Co-starring Michel Piccoli ("Max and the Junkmen") and co-scripted by Buñuel’s frequent cohort, Jean-Claude Carrière ("The Milky Way").
