Cannes Review: Radu Jude’s Diary of a Chambermaid Is a Humurous, Slight Meta Take on Mirbeau

Radu Jude has been rolling through features since his international breakout Aferim! in 2015, and his taste is nearly impossible to pin down. The films range from a three-hour documentary on the first massacre of Jews in Romania during WWII to an outrageous comedy about a production assistant shooting a safety video in Bucharest to an absurdist meta-take on Dracula (it’s not Dracula) riddled with intentionally poor AI to a dramedy about a Transylvanian bailiff to a scathing critique of modern Romanian conservatism titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (arguably his best). Diary of a Chambermaid marks his twelfth film in eleven years, which is not counting the shorts and segments for other projects he’s directed over the same stretch (or playing a bit part in Arthur Harari’s The Unknown in this year’s competition).

It is very loosely based on Octave Mirbeau’s French 1900 novel that’s been adapted to the screen three times: in the 1940s by Jean Renoir, the 1960s by Luis Buñuel, and in 2015 by Benoît Jacquot. Those tell more-or-less-iterative versions of the novel, which follows a cunning servant named Célestine who schemes her way into wealth. Jude’s take is more meta and doesn’t really deal with Mirbeau’s plot at all. If anything, its title is more a cheeky reference and less an indication as to what this film is about. It is, however, very literally about the diary of a maid working in Paris.

Her name is Gianina (Ana Dumitrascu), a Romanian live-in maid for Marguerite (Mélanie Thierry) and the Asterix- and Obelix-hating Pierre Donnadieu (a gutbusting Vincent Macaigne), an affluent French couple with a child whose opulence and inundation with bourgeois concerns render them tone-deaf to Gianina’s life and needs. They think they treat her well by speaking kindly, keeping out of her way, and pretending to be flexible; in reality, they always get their way. They don’t seem to recognize Gianina’s humanity. To them, she’s more like a cleaning, child-rearing, infinitely available android who they occasionally ask ridiculous questions like, “Should Ukraine give up to Russia?” in front of a huge dinner party of highly opinionated guests that span the political spectrum (that conversation, in true Jude-ian fashion, ends hysterically on the topic of how fuckable Zelensky is).

Gianina is good at her job, but she’s about as timid as people come, which allows the Donnadieus to walk all over her. Perhaps if she stood up for herself or her time, she’d get fired, but it doesn’t come across like so. There’s plenty of breathing room for self-respect. It wouldn’t be too big a deal if she didn’t have a five-year-old daughter who misses her terribly back home in Romania. The extent of their relationship over the course of Diary (September to December) solely comprises FaceTimes and photos, and it makes Gianina’s heart ache for her only child. She promises her daughter that she’ll be home on specific dates, but something insignificant for the Donnadieus always comes up and keeps her in Paris. 

We go through day after day in the life of Gianina as if we’re reading her diary, the film edited in sudden cuts that play like punchlines at the end of most sequences, which begin with a date—usually two-to-four days after the previous, notwithstanding longer and shorter time hops. In between her menial duties, she’s decided, at the behest of the slightly less-tone-deaf Marguerite, to act in a play—a stage adaptation of The Diary of a Chambermaid. The experimental, minority-centric theatre company putting it on (headed by Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’s Ilinca Manolache) takes a minimalist approach, casting non-actor Gianina as the maid and another non-actor in every other part. Their kooky, long-winded version is more like the work we would get from Jude if he wanted to adapt the book faithfully while still injecting his ludicrous humor. 

Long, static single takes show us in farcical, side-splitting fashion just how bad of an actor Gianina is (a testament to Dumitrascu’s terrific performance) and how comically inept the company’s version of the play will be. On top of that, they ask her to perform the whole thing naked, but sternly specify that they don’t have the budget for an intimacy coordinator, something Gianina should obviously push back on and even more obviously doesn’t. 

At 94 minutes and with a barrel of laughs in tow, Diary of a Chambermaid goes by pretty quickly, but comes to grow stale and doesn’t amount to more than a series of funny sequences. If Jude had spent more time or creative energy—or perhaps contributed some drama outside of the final act (which, at that point, simply feels misplaced)—it may have proved great. But ugly, hyper-digital, quickly assembled iPhone cinematography drags this experience down a few grades, and despite an already-brisk runtime, Jude could’ve slashed about 20 minutes of overwrought sequences to craft a much stronger vision. It’s a welcome albeit slight entry in Radu Jude’s filmography, not the kind of thing to make waves. If one wants a good, quick, Euro-arthouse laugh, though, it’ll go down smooth.

Diary of a Chambermaid premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.