20/05/2026 - CANNES 2026: Radu Jude goes back to beautiful basics in this lightly metatheatrical piece about a Romanian mother working in the home of a bourgeois Bordeaux family

Ana Dumitrașcu (left) and Mélanie Thierry in The Diary of a Chambermaid

You’d be hard-pressed to find a crispier first time on the Croisette for Radu Jude, who is making a return to form after his three-hour AI saga Dracula, a movie that is in total juxtaposition with his new, hour-and-a-half The Diary of a Chambermaid. With his premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, the director toys with his classical view on the patronising bourgeois and a familiar satirisation of lowbrow-highbrow Europe: the so-called barbaric East and civilised West. As much as it’s been done before, Jude executes the melange with certainty, mixing it all together into a welcome velouté of political modernity and dark humour.

This Bordeaux-set film is a reinterpretation – in the title card, Jude uses the word “variation” – of Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel The Diary of a Chambermaid. Gianina (Ana Dumitrașcu) works tirelessly in the home of the wealthy Donnadieus (Mélanie Thierry as Marguerite and Vincent Macaigne as Pierre), as a cook, housekeeper and nanny for their son Louen (Louen Bouteiller). While the young Romanian woman just wants to get back to her pre-teen daughter Maria (Sofia Dragoman) for the holidays, Marguerite encourages her to act in an amateur play adaptation of the titular story, adding a metatheatrical element to the movie.

Jude easily finds a star in Ana Dumitrașcu, who played a bit part in Dracula. The acquiescent, empathy-inducing wavering in her voice is slapped back by every Romanian swear word she lobs under her breath at the Donnadieus. In perhaps a partly unintentional move, even seeing the French subtitles turn her name into “Janina” when the family calls for her feels like a violation of her autonomy. As the Donnadieus argue with their ivory-towered French friends about the future of Europe and demand Gianina give her opinion – as the one person from “the East” in the room – Jude creates a multi-layered joke that moves off the screen. He turns his politically flavoured cringe comedy into a moment that comes careening back like a boomerang: audiences who laugh at the group’s ignorance become skewered themselves by their own self-endorsed superiority complex, mimicking that of the characters.

The Diary of a Chambermaid is, in many ways, pleasantly simple in how Jude chooses to deliver his point. With lensing by his frequent cinematographic collaborator Marius Panduru, the Romanian filmmaker prefers his unpretentious, still camera, further using smartphone footage to illustrate Gianina’s perspective, insert video calls and curate the passage of time through crops withering in a field. An ungainly tension hangs in the air between Gianina and Pierre as he hands her a bonus for taking care of his mother, Madame Anne (Marie Rivière). They are both playing their own roles of bashfully generous boss and wilfully obedient staff, as dictated by their respective habitus.

The film ends on a surprisingly uncynical note, which could be read in several ways. Jude might move through the Romanian folktale of Fǎt-Frumos, as told by Gianina, yet his storytelling also simultaneously evokes the Chinese fable-parable of The Old Man Losing His Horse: bad luck may simply be a blessing in disguise, but this blessing may beget further bad luck as a result. For the working class, it’s all but a wicked problem.

The Diary of a Chambermaid is a production by France’s SBS Productions, co-produced by Romania’s Avanpost. SBS International holds the rights to its world sales.