Parisian maid Célestine (Jeanne Moreau) moves to a remote estate to tend house for the peculiar Monsieur Monteil (Michel Piccoli), joining a downstairs team of eccentrics whose idiosyncrasies rival those of their fetishistic employer. Director Luis Buñuel admired French actress and chanteuse Jeanne Moreau since seeing Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958) and was thrilled to cast her as the titular chambermaid in his and Jean-Claude Carrière’s adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s subversive 1900 novel. “She taught me things about the character...that I never expected were there,” Buñuel wrote in his 1982 autobiography, and their felicitous pairing jumpstarted a fertile period of filmmaking for the Spanish-born director in France.

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.