Buñuel's story finds its origin in the novel of Octave Mirbeau. The plot follows the young Celestine who goes to work as a chambermaid in rural France of the late 1920s. Her employers are a dysfunctional bourgeois family of three, all of whom carry out clandestine activities behind closed doors. Rabour, the master of the household, owns an album of dirty postcards and a collection of ladies footwear. He obliges his maids to wear black leather boots while they read to him. He, in turn, strokes their boots and calves lustfully during this session. Part-way into the film he is found dead, lying naked in bed, clutching a pair of boots in his arms.
Museum of the Moving Image, New York Sunday 18 Mar 2007, 4:00 p.m.