Mirbeau’s famous novel has been adapted for the screen countless times. Undaunted by the versions of Renoir and Buñuel before him, Jude boldly reworks the original in his own way. The film runs three strands in parallel: a migrant worker performing domestic labor, her participation - at her employer’s suggestion - in a rehearsal of Mirbeau’s play, and the family she left behind in Romania. It is both easy and difficult to pin down Jude’s intentions as he considers, ‘the starkly different conditions of France and Romania despite their shared membership in the European Union, and the blurred boundary between a perverse play and a corrupt reality.’ He clearly takes aim at the exploitation of working women, bourgeois corruption, intellectual hypocrisy, the false promises of liberalism, and the class prejudice embedded in everyday life - yet this time, Jude trades his earlier caustic attacks for a blade wielded with a quiet smile. He does not restage Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995). And so how one takes its unexpected ending may well depend on where the viewer is standing. (LEE Yong Cheol)