Set in the 1930s French countryside, the first of several films Buñuel co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière (who also plays a cleric in the film) is sardonically laced with absurd perversions of classism and fascism. The chambermaid of the title is the enigmatic Parisian Célestine who is besieged as soon as she steps off of the train by the frustrated desires and eccentric obsessions of the Montreils, a rural bourgeois clan at war with each other, the neighbors, and “foreigners” at large. When one of them commits a sordid crime, the avenging Célestine takes an unpredictable, mystifying path. Everywhere she goes, she cannot escape one of Buñuel’s famous fetish objects, the boot – titillating, incriminating, and ultimately pointing the way to a greater, darker march on the horizon. – BG