Seriously, I applaud the Philadelphia Film Festival for not only including Radu Jude in its Masters of Cinema sidebar, but also screening his latest film, Diary of a Chambermaid, as part of it. Following Kontinental ’25, Jude once again takes an existing work and remixes it in his own inimitable way, this time drawing inspiration from Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel of the same name. The film also marks the director’s French debut, taking place primarily in Bordeaux and following Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu), a Romanian immigrant hired as a live-in nanny for a wealthy family.
While Mirbeau’s novel is a salacious account of a young maid at the mercy of her employers and their perverse vices, that literal thread remains here, albeit in a meta context: a play Gianina performs during her off-hours, to hilarious effect. Instead, Jude is more interested in how her wealthy, classist employers exploit and look down on her under the guise of their own politically correct sensibilities. The film’s story begins in September, with Gianina counting down the days for four months – until she can reunite with her daughter during her planned Christmas break.
While this feels like it could be one of Jude’s more accessible films, Diary of a Chambermaid still has the humor and satirical edge you’d expect. There’s also a surprisingly big heart at the center of the film, thanks to Ana Dumitrașcu, who imbues this foul-mouthed nanny with genuine warmth. Gianina isn’t afraid to let her feelings be known in her native tongue, but she also genuinely cares for the family and those around her, often to her own detriment. Some of the film’s most tender moments come from her interactions with the family’s son, whom she regales with some rather hilariously terrifying Romanian folktales.
Rather than follow its source material as a rigid narrative blueprint, Jude uses its central themes to explore the modern immigrant experience, exposing the same class divisions and exploitation beneath the veneer of our supposedly enlightened, politically correct era. His razor-sharp satire zeroes in on the hypocrisy lurking beneath the family’s carefully cultivated liberal sensibilities. What makes it all resonate, though, is Dumitrașcu’s empathetic performance, which draws us into Gianina’s world and makes us genuinely care about this quirky nanny. Diary of a Chambermaid may not be as bizarre or surreal as some of Jude’s previous films, but it proves he’s not simply interested in shocking his audience. When he has something meaningful to say, he knows exactly how to say it.
