The Thrill of a New Radu Jude Film | Critics Corner (in Cannes)

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]This is coming off the heels of last year's Dracula, which is like, you know, go-for-broke vulgar maybe, you know.

[00:00:06]>> Instant Locarno classic.

[00:00:07]>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, great movie. Like, you know, rampant use of AI, dicks everywhere, it's great.

[00:00:13]>> [music] >> A festival simply feels incomplete without a new Radu Jude. The hyper-prolific Romanian maverick always delivers forward-thinking films as gleefully transgressive as they are intellectually nourishing. After unleashing his galaxy-brained take on Dracula in Locarno, he now graces the Croisette with the more restrained Octave Mirbeau adaptation Diary of a Chambermaid.

[00:00:38]Chloe, welcome in Cannes. Thank you so much, Hugo. It's great to be here. You just watched the new Radu Jude film Diary of a Chambermaid. I'm very curious given the fact that Radu Jude is incredibly prolific filmmaker. Last year he was in Locarno with Dracula, which was very zany and very wild. How does this film compare to his more recent output?

[00:00:58]Well, I think the pleasure of watching Radu Jude is just kind of like feeling you like you're watching someone who is sort of like documenting the world in real time almost just because he's so prolific. Like, you know, it's always exciting to see kind of like how he's approaching the moment like each year.

[00:01:14]And sometimes he'll have two films in each year. I think his take on Diary of a Chambermaid is relatively conventional maybe in his filmography, but I also wouldn't call it a conventional film.

[00:01:23]There are a lot of things that are going to be familiar to people who love his work, particularly play with juxtaposition. There are lots of different types of footage in here from FaceTime calls to um you know, exterior shots like in Romania to, you know, the main through line of the story, which is an adaptation of the Octave Mirbeau uh novel, um which has been adopted many, many times. But, you know, this is a little bit more sort of free-flowing and montage-based. And there are also a lot of theatrical sequences. How pleasurable was this film for you? And do you feel that he's just as gleefully reinventing himself here time and time again. It'll It'll drop in these moments that are suddenly in like a totally different mode, like more sincere um in a way that sort of like makes you, you know, recontextualize how he's like I guess like he always just sort of like makes me aware of how the movie's kind of brown like sentimentality and often will have a moment that's like quite affecting after sort of like these very kind of distancing moments. It's hard to explain, but um I always find myself just sort of like surprised and reconnecting with my emotions when I watch his movies and this was no different.