Events

Cohen Media Group is proud to announce the upcoming release of Benoît Jacquot’s provocative update of the classic novel DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID, starring Léa Seydoux as the titular chambermaid, in her second collaboration with Mr. Jacquot since Farewell, My Queen, and award-winning French actor Vincent Lindon (The Measure of a Man). DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID is scheduled to open on Friday, June 10 in New York (Lincoln Plaza Cinema) and Los Angeles (Royal).

Léa Seydoux follows in the footsteps of Paulette Goddard and Jeanne Moreau, as Célestine, a resentful young Parisian chambermaid who finds herself exiled to a position in the provinces. There she must immediately chafe against the noxious iron rules and pettiness of her bourgeois mistress (Clotilde Mollet), rebuff the groping advances of Monsieur (Hervé Pierre), and reckon with her fascination with the earthy, brooding gardener Joseph (Lindon). Backtracking past the fetishism of Buñuel’s version to Octave Mirbeau’s original 1900 novel, Benoît Jacquot offers some trenchant commentary about the present state of French society: the sense of social suffocation, Célestine’s humiliating submission to her employer, and Joseph’s virulent anti-Semitism. But he also uses the turn-of-the-century setting when psychoanalysis burst forth, to look past the characters’ outward behavior and appearance, and reveal the repression, social codes and compulsions they conceal.

Léa Seydoux shot to international fame after winning the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, alongside her co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos and director Abdellatif Kéchiche, for her critically acclaimed role as Emma in Blue is the Warmest Color.  She has starred in numerous films including Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, Bertrand Bonelli’s Saint Laurent, and as a Bond Girl in Sam Mendes’ Spectre. Seydoux will next be seen in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World.

After starting out as Marguerite Duras’ assistant director, prolific writer/director Benoît Jacquot has directed over 40 feature films, often adapting literary works by writers such as Henry James, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Dostoyevsky, Marivaux, and Yukio Mishima. He has worked with some of France’s top actors on films including the critical hit Farewell, My Queen (Diane Kruger and Ms. Seydoux), Sade (Daniel Auteuil), The School of Flesh (Isabelle Huppert) and A Single Girl (Virginie Ledoyen,) as well as a documentary about seminal French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.  Mr. Jacquot’s next film A Jamais, adapted from the novel The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, stars Mathieu Amalric and Jeanne Balibar.