Anne Garec, Howard Vernon and Lina Romay are featured in CELESTINE, MAID AT YOUR SERVICE, Jess Franco’s lighthearted unofficial remake of Luís Buñuel’s DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID.


Imports


CÉLESTINE... MÄDCHEN FÜR INTIME STUNDEN Célestine... Bonne à Tout Faire aka CELESTINE... MAID AT YOUR SERVICE, CELESTINE... AN ALL-AROUND MAID 1974, Edition Tonfilm, €31.98, 94m 17s, BR+DVD


HEISSE BERUHRUNGEN aka MIDNIGHT PARTY 1975, Edition Tonfilm, €49.99, 89m 38s, DVD By Tim Lucas


The German label Edition Tonfilm has initiated a splendid new program of archaeology into the works of Jess Franco with these two sex comedies from the early-to-mid-1970s, one of them the subject of the first Franco Blu-ray disc. Célestine... Bonne à Tout Faire may seem on odd choice for this honor, but


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the results show why it was a most fortuitous one. The film’s very character is luminous; it’s that rare Franco film that whistles a happy tune and ventures down no dark corridors of the soul. Scripted by Franco’s first wife and longtime script girl Nicole Guettard (who wrote quite a few of his best films of this period, including that other elliptic title LORNA... THE EXORCIST), it’s a spicy co-opting of the principal character from Octave Mirbeau’s novel THE DIARY OF A CHAMBER- MAID, twice filmed previously, first in 1946 by Jean Renoir with Paulette Goddard as Celestine, and again in 1964 by Franco’s fellow Spanish expatriate Luís Buñuel, who worked from a mod- erately darker script by Jean- Claude Carrière, subsequently Franco’s co-writer on THE DIA- BOLICAL DR. Z and ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS (both 1965), and starring Jeanne Moreau. The slender story opens with Celestine (Lina Romay) eluding


arrest with a friend as the police raid a brothel. While hiding out in the hayloft of the Count de la Braquette’s (Howard Vernon’s) estate, she meets the hayseed handyman Sébastien (Ramón Ardid, billed as Raymond Hardy) and the butler Malou (Bigottini, aka Rick De Conninck—a fine comic actor also seen in Louis Malle’s ZAZIE), who reward her erotic favors with the offer of employment. In a manner recall- ing Terence Stamp’s effect on the household in Pasolini’s TEOREMA, Celestine’s open and relaxed attitude toward sexuality has a transformative effect on the isolated, moribund inhabitants of the mansion, imbuing them with a gift of renewed life for the men and women alike, that remains even after a third act twist that forces her to betray them. This is Franco’s most success- ful comedy, merrily buoyed by a lively score by Paul de Senneville and Olivier Toussaint, and it fea- tures what is likely Lina Romay’s


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