Throughout his career, director Radu Jude has seldom been interested in making quiet or straightforward films. The Romanian filmmaker has built a strong reputation ever since his feature debut in 2009, with The Happiest Girl in the World, and often incorporates satire, absurdity, and unconventional storytelling in his projects.
His latest feature is The Diary of a Chambermaid, which made its North American premiere at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Loosely based on Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel of the same name, Jude takes this story from over a century ago and relocates it to modern-day France. In the process, the director uses this setting to explore ideas of class, exploitation, and privilege when it comes to migrant workers in modern Europe.
The film follows Gianina (played by Ana Dumitrașcu), a Romanian woman who moves to France and works as a live-in housekeeper for an upper-class family. Her daughter, however, stays in Romania, which leaves her caught between a rock and a hard place – she must work abroad in order to provide for her family, but is also tortured by the emotional cost of being separated from them. Interestingly, the family that employs Gianina aren’t particularly bad people, but their rich lives (and, more broadly, how comfortable they are) provide an interesting contrast with the main character, who has made sacrifice after sacrifice.
The Diary Of A Chambermaid Finds Its Strongest Moments In Gianina’s Personal Story
Jude’s decision to take Mirbeau’s original story and move it to the modern day is a particularly effective one. However, the director is also taking these characters and moving them into some new directions: Gianina, for example, isn’t just a contemporary version of Célestine. Instead, she represents a very different kind of chambermaid, and one whose exploration is far more subtle than it is in the original story.
There’s no screaming or mistreatment, generally speaking, yet that power imbalance remains apparent. Gianina is there to clean someone else’s home, and, more broadly, serve them in any way they want. She does all this as her family are thousands of miles away in an entirely different country, and all this creates an emotional heartbreak that the audience is likely to feel for her.
Unfortunately, The Diary of a Chambermaid doesn’t always know what to do with its most interesting ideas. One of the director’s more curious decisions is having Gianina participate in an amateur theatrical production of The Diary of a Chambermaid itself. It’s an interesting meta component to the movie that creates a story-within-a-story with the potential to offer further analysis on the dynamics between the rich and the poor.
However, the scenes focused on the play feel largely unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. The broader story is often brought to a halt when rehearsals begin, and what initially seems like a clever idea eventually becomes more of a chore than anything else. Perhaps most interestingly, these struggles are in part because The Diary of a Chambermaid never commits the necessary time or energy to pull off something like this. That’s especially curious given Jude’s track record of pushing cinematic conventions to their limits.
The same sort of problem plagues other aspects of the film as well. Jude shows a surprising amount of restraint when it comes to certain portrayals of other characters and, more broadly, other storylines. Take Gianina’s employers: They aren’t monsters, and that’s likely the point that Jude is trying to make. They are more subtle in their oppression than anything else; patronizing rather than explicitly malicious. This shows itself during the political conversations the family attempt to have with Gianina. She is not at all engaged in these talks, and while she’s attempting to move away from the conversation, the family reveal just how detached they are from reality.
Again, these are intriguing ideas to explore, but there’s a negative consequence to them as well: The family never become particularly compelling antagonists. The film could do with more commitment in this regard, finding the right balance between subtly and effectively telling the story at hand.
The Diary of a Chambermaid screened at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
- Release Date
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October 23, 2026
- Runtime
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94 minutes
- Director
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Radu Jude
- Writers
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Radu Jude
- Producers
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Saïd Ben Saïd
Cast
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Marie Rivière
Madame Anne
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