User Reviews

In Lorraine, the worker Horty (Olivier Martinez) wins an internal competition promoted by Simeon (Didier Bezace), the owner of the foundry where he works, and the prize is a travel to Southampton alone to see the departure of the Titanic. Once in the hotel in England, a woman called Marie (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) knocks on his door telling that she is a chambermaid of the Titanic and the hotel is completely booked and she has no place to stay. Horty invites Marie to share his room; on the next morning, Marie is gone but Horty gets her picture with a street photographer. When Horty returns to his French town, he is promoted and his colleagues insinuate that his wife Zoe (Romane Bohringer) had had an affair with Simeon. The upset and jealous Horty goes to a bar with his friends and while drinking, he shows the picture of Marie and tells erotic fantasies about his one nightstand with her. His erotic tales become famous, drawing more and more people in the audience every night in the bar and changing the sexual lives of his friends. His fame reaches the actor Zeppe (Aldo Maccione) that proposes a business with Horty.

"La Femme de Chambre du Titanic" is a totally original romance that blends the tragedy of the Titanic with the lives of ordinary people, developing an intriguing and erotic love story. The truth about the night of Horty and Marie is disclosed only in the very end, and the viewers are never sure whether Horty is fantasizing because he believes Zoe has betrayed him, or if his affair with Marie had really happened. Surprisingly there are bad reviews in IMDb about this good film. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Camareira do Titanic" ("The Chambermaid of the Titanic")

This collaboration between France and Italy is simply a very original movie, with a scrip of a great intelligence. We don't really know if Olivier Martinez is telling lies, but like the people who listen to him, we want to hear him and believe him. And like in a great short story of litterature, we know the true at the end, but the director told us, in a little part, that it's not really sure... The idea of shows in little theatres, by the last half of the film, is simply brillant. I have study the reaction of people with melodrama at this time of the 20th century, and we saw that in this film

exactly like it was in the early 1910's. This is truly a wonderful movie.

I love this film; it dares to let the audience be soaked in wonderfully melodramatic and lustfully vulgar scenes. Feelings and drama make the film rattle, and when, in addition to this, the humor is so frequent, this film can't fail. It is erotic, wonderful, lovely. Ace.

An ordinary foundry worker called Horty : Olivier Martinez wins a strongman contest and his prize is a trip to Southampton to see the launch of the Titanic. In England, Marie : Aitana Sanchez Gijon , saying she is a chambermaid on the Titanic and cannot get a room, asks to share his room. They do, chastely; when he awakens, she is gone, but he sees her at the sailing and gets a photo of her. When ship sinks in 1912 and chambermaid probably dies, his story gains popularity. But lie always has its price. When he returns home, he suspects that his wife Zoe : Romane Bohringer, has been sleeping with Simeon, the foundry owner. Horty goes to the bar, where his friends get him drunk and he starts telling his past incidents and gradually beginning to believe his own lies about his passionate escapade. There was more than one love story on the Titanic !.

A romantic and slow-moving drama based upon the novel by Didier Decoin about the erotic fantasy of what happened our starring and Marie , as he becomes a story teller drawing a larger audience each night , while he fakes a love story between him and the chambermaid from RMS Titanic. The peculiar filmmaker Bigas Luna (Jamon Jamon, Yo Soy La Juani) directs this co-production starring Olvier Martinez (Unfaithful), Aitana Sánchez Gijón (La Carta Esferica) and Romane Bohringer (Vigo) . Passable interpretation from Olivier Martinez as Horty, a French foundry worker who wins a contest and is sent to see the sailing of the Titanic while meets a beautiful chambermaid called Maria, finely performed by Aitana Sánchez Gijón, with whom he shares the hotel room .

The motion picture was decently directed by Bigas Luna , following his particular style , though displays a number of flaws and gaps. He often uses in his films twisted events , erotic scenes and surrealist images. Luna was a Bon Vivant who along with his wife, produced wine, ham, and organic products ; they are well shown in his films . In 1990 producer Andrés Vicente Gómez persuaded him to return to cinema and entrusted to him the direction of Las Edades De Lulú (The Ages of Lulu), an erotic drama about a young woman exploring extreme sexual practices , this was a commercial success . Without abandoning his dedication to painting and photography, reflected in numerous exhibitions, he began the well-known "Iberian Trilogy" with Jamón Jamón ("Ham, Ham", 1992), Huevos de Oro ("Golden Balls", 1993) and La Teta y La Luna ("The Tit and the Moon", 1994). Jamón Jamón, which launched the careers of both Javier Bardem and the 16-year-old Penélope Cruz was a major international success and won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1992. Cruz returned in Volavérunt (1999), a film about the relationship between Francisco Goya and the Duchess of Alba . This film ¨La femme de chambre du Titanic (1997)¨ is stylishly photographed and smartly designed and here Bigas Luna delivers his ordinary and erotic goods in cool sense of style . Rating : 5.5/10 . Acceptable and passable but a bit boring.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing stories to board the Titanic craze is this exquisite tale of a foundry worker and a chambermaid. Never actually setting foot on the famed vessel itself, the action centers on a night in a Southampton hotel the night before the ill-fated vessel left England for the first and last time. That night, roomless title maid Marie who works for the line not the hotel) knocks on the door of handsome Horty, who has won a contest at the French foundry where he works and is rewarded with a trip to see the eventful sailing. Because Horty's boss has eyes for his lovely wife Zoe, she remains at home, leaving Marie and Horty to their own devices.

Horty returns home having been faithful, but is unsure if his wife has done the same. From then on, Horty's barroom revelations of his encounter with Titanic and maid become more and more embroidered. Both to anger Zoe and to please his audience, Horty's stories become nothing short of hallucinatory. After the liner's sinking, Horty's fate is sealed as a virtual one man show, relating what is now nearly all fiction, including his presence on the ship the night it went down.

But the fickle hand of fate that took the Titanic to a watery grave has just as unexpected plans for Horty and Zoe, who now "plays" Marie in a full-length stage production of Horty's story. The final act of this impressive motion picture is just as dramatic and humbling in it's way as the story of the liner itself.

Director J.J. Bigas Luna peppers this French language feature with water imagery, forshadowing the Titanic's fate and a crucial plot point for Marie and Horty. A letterbox video release is terrific except for that the subtitles are a bit small. See it on a bigscreen TV. Although, there's no sinking to gape at, the human drama is also of titanic size.

This is a French film directed by the Spanish director Bigas Luna, who has done a very good job with a difficult and ambiguous subject, which alternates between reality and fantasy so often that it is like a shuttle service. One really does not know from one scene to the next whether something is really happening or is being imagined. That is a tightrope, but Luna does not fall off. In this, he is assisted by the dreamy performances of Olivier Martinez (half French, half Spanish-Moroccan) and the well known Spanish actress Aitana Sanchez-Gijon. Both of them keep us wondering all the way. The only solid earthy figure is Romane Bohringer, being as Anna Magnani-like as possible, a young earth mother, but still an earth mother. There is lots of passion, it's all over the place. Sometimes it is real, sometimes it is fantasy. One never knows for sure about some of it. When Martinez is telling his stories, his quiet, introspective but commanding presence effects us as much as it does his audiences in the film. Romane gets a bit carried away by the myth of the chambermaid and wishes to become the chambermaid, wishes to be sprayed in champagne. The chambermaid was not listed amongst the survivors of the Titanic, so this creates a story steeped in tragedy. People like tragic passion best, because it is unattainable by definition, and can never disappoint. Or can it? Perhaps things are not entirely as they seem in more ways than one in this story. This film shows clearly how love and sensuality thrive in the hothouse of ambivalence and ambiguity: does someone really exist? Do they feel love too? Is the love simulated? Can any passion be trusted? Ultimately, it comes down to this: is reality even real?

I've renewed my interest in Titanic over the past year or so and happened across this movie. I thought it was an OK movie after I saw it about two months ago but since then there's been an aspect that I can't get around.

I can go for how the townspeople were entranced by Horty's stories. They knew him, after all. But once he took the performance on the road and was charging admission to complete strangers, things changed; the least of which is that since they didn't know Horty, I don't think they'd relate to him the way the townspeople in the tavern did.

Imagine you were one of his audience members, seeing his show in the weeks following the disaster.

To imagine yourself as a member of the audience at that time, imagine that it's November 2001 and you're going to the show of someone claiming to be a survivor of the World Trade Center. You sit there and listen to the speaker go on and on about his torrid love affair with the coffee shop girl on the 80th floor sky lobby. Wouldn't he -- and you, for that matter -- be more interested in what it was like to survive the disaster? And after we've seen the pictures of the poor souls plunging from the buildings, and keeping in mind that the 9/11 lost are as dead as those on Titanic, wouldn't you think that having a set with the side of the building and an actress pantomiming the death plunge, much as Zoe was mimicking the drowning Marie, be in incredibly poor taste? That aspect of his production alone would make me consider Horty to be a shameless opportunist, regardless of what he actually said.

This was an excellent movie & one of the funniest I've ever seen. I'm not the biggest Luna fan, but this was a great story with really good acting, too. The actress who played Zoe did a great job with a tough role.

Another viewing of this film recently simply left me where I was before: there is something about Bigas Luna which escapes me, or just simply irritates me. Whereas any viewing of Aitana Sánchez-Gijón evidently has its pluses, inasfar as anything else related to the story being told, I think I would rather make do with the pages of Didier Decoin.

Having already waded through the insufferable `Las Edades de Lulú' (qv), `La Teta y La Luna' (definitely no qv), the trivial and frivolous `Bámbola' (qv), and the overstated and over-coloured `Volavérunt' (qv), I think I can only be glad that, thus far, I have missed out on `Jamón, Jamón' or `Los Huevos de Oro', among others, without being unfortunate enough to have missed out on anything. But the irritating thing is that Bigas Luna is a genius. Maybe not in the sense of getting the best acting interpretations – he doesn't – but certainly in all other techniques involved in making a film, especially in scene-setting for yesteryear and even longer ago. This is evidently apparent in `La Femme de Chambre du Titanic' and `Volavérunt', in which the Italian Franca Squarciapino is clearly one of the best specialists in the matter: the period costumes are superb in both films. I see on IMDb that she had plenty of schooling back in the 1980s with operatic productions.

So I patiently sit here awaiting the next Bigas Luna – more or less anticipating what it will be, because I am definitely in no rush for it, and will not even be sorry if it goes by without my catching on. But if it does turn up, you can be sure I shall be watching: there is something fascinating about a man whose films do not exactly end up being very appetising fare but which show such remarkable cinematographic talent.

Forget James Cameron's over-done shallow film based on the same genre, this is the film that you should see. The story told is very moving and is one of the year's best films.

If you getting into this movie without expectation you will enjoy more .i started seeing this movie for just the sex scene but this movie dragged me on,will dragged you in too

When I sat down to watch the 1997 romantic drama "La Femme De Chambre Du Titanic" (aka "The Chambermaid on the Titanic"), it was solely because this movie had Titanic as a focal point.

Sure, I had never heard about this movie from writers Cuca Canals, Jean-Louis Benoît and Bigas Luna prior to sitting down to watch it here in 2022. So I didn't know what to expect, nor had I any idea what I was in for here.

Director Bigas Luna didn't exactly manage to deliver a movie that really appealed to me. The narrative in the movie was simply too simplistic and uneventful. And while the Titanic was in the story, the movie just didn't revolve too much around that majestic ship. This movie was just simply too slow paced and uneventful for my liking. So the movie fell short of appealing to me.

I was initially thrilled to see Olivier Martinez on the cast list, but just watching him sit around a bar, drinking and telling tall tales just didn't count as being proper entertainment for me.

This movie was a swing and a miss. And it is not a movie that I will ever be returning to watch a second time. Nor is it a movie that I would recommend for people with an interest in the Titanic.

My rating of "La Femme De Chambre Du Titanic" lands on a two out of ten stars.

Guidelines???

Whilst perusing the SBS sex week movies, we stumbled accross this action classic. Giovanni steals the show with his cooky antics, he even manages to juggle 3 things. 3!!!

Horty's classic line re: smelter works whilsts wooing the woman will be a moment that stays with me forever. No wonder he got to knick her pippy 12 times in one night. Aminal.

I highly recommend this film for any prospective lover or artist. Be well, be shell

The start was actually interesting then it drops like it's not even the same film. A loser that skipped the occasion to go to bed with a woman, makes it an existential crisis, and start inventing fetish stories in the most exaggerated way. Reminds me of that guy at school that everyone listens its girl stories about. The guys at the bar are really fun tho, it's like they can't live without hearing a love story without dreaming at eyes open. Then it becomes a bit pathetic and the wife actually wants to do the fetishes she actually criticized about his stories. Bruh. I feel like to enjoy this movie you have to watch it in a funny and ironic way.

Now for the characters limit: The start was actually interesting then it drops like it's not even the same film. A loser that skipped the occasion to not go to bed with a woman.

"La Femme de chambre du Titanic" is one of the best film by the spanish director Bigas Luna and my opinion it is the only one.

The reason is because is very different,it is not like the other films,which serve us sex scenes.This film is romantic and present the fantasies of a middle class man (Olivier Martinez)when he win a ticket to the departure of the titanic.There,in England he knows a beautiful woman,Marie,and she pass a night with him in his hotel room.

then,when he returns,He tell stories in the bar and people heard them very carefully so he imagine new stories.

There is no explicit sex like in "Son de mar" or "Jamon,Jamon" and this is good because "la femme de chambre du titanic" Becomes Romantic and perhaps a little bit erotic

Great poetic film about ordinary life and one-night romance that will last forever, even when it's not real at all!. A superb casting, a Bigas Luna dominating the slow pace, even through the many changes of the story.

because this film is a poetry...

the developing prose of the story with the abstract implying ideas (specially the suggestive narrative story telling) that synchronize in the rhythmical scenes and intense drama of passion, along the scripts playing with language from polite to vulgar.... and then there's how it's filmed rich in emotion from all the characters even by the by-standers, with an almost accurate period movie where past early after turn of the 20th century we get to glimpse travel.... but at always this film remain or kept itself simplistic in style despite the intricate weaving and integrating of the art of old world romance, dark mystery movie and sarcastic humour in suppress comedy, while the drama of human conflicts and aspirations are all in one (it all depends on your receptors at the time of watching)... or very accessible to watch...

and then there is the way of how contrasting dimensional realities (but naturally looked at as life) becomes romantic even in the hindsight tragic of titanic (distasteful exploitation of as soon as that event happened)... and then on top of even another dimension is that the story is focus on the fantasy element - huge passionate erotic romantic narration that are all base to the "keep coming back to that ultimate one-night stand" which is the center of the plot....

For instance: life in the smelters or foundry, the peasantry lower working families of rural mining processor towns, the intrigues and the theatrics of salacious subject matter have driven the pheasant existence of workers who could only dream of what's life in opulence, of experiencing real passionate romantic escapade in the midst of luxury even as a servitude (instead of just daily toiling and working to meet the basic necessity in the back-draft of small rural factory town)... sexual passion with a sensual stranger in forms of flashbacks that make one wonder of life beyond the town.... the main character's fantasy is now the town's.... whereby it begins to represent the workers' escape of a humdrum life, as all they want is to be entertained with stories of concocted true events or fantastic lies well put together..... which really is the component (patronizing crowd audience) and what is binding to the elements (the story telling or narrative) of the film...

what really is surprising and very much what makes treasure of the film is between Olivier Martinez and Aitana Sanchez-Gijon chemistry and real genuine passion, that's hard to fake sensual romantic intensity, as much as naturally born sexiness, sex appeal and good looks cannot be faked either....