Movie Monthly: The Maid
The Maid (La Nana), which just opened, is one of those films that you could watch as straight drama or that could have you in stitches. The tone is ambiguous, adding a certain mysterious quality to the film. It takes some time to see where it is going.
Virtually all the film is spent with Raquel (Catalinia Saavedra), a surly, live-in housemaid who tends a large upper-middle class family in Santiago, Chile. We meet Raquel in the opening frame having a birthday meal, alone, at the kitchen table. While her blank, unsmiling expression reflects a physical and emotional exhaustion from a workload that involves everything from waking and putting the children to bed, to washing and cleaning, to waiting the dinner table, the dullness behind her eyes comes from more than just being overworked.
This becomes apparent when Mrs Valdez, out of concern for Raquel’s health, tries to hire a second maid to help her long-suffering servant: Raquel suffers from dizzy spells and painful headaches and yet she has an almost sociopathic resistance to help. Ignoring her maid’s stubborn ways Mrs Valdez proceeds to hire the second maid and the tension within the house creates some strange and amusing interactions involving, among other things a kitten, locked doors, and a model of a tall ship (the elusive Mr Valdez is a serious model hobbyist).
Considering the amount of time we spend with Raquel we don’t learn a great deal about her, at least not initially. It’s as if 20 years of washing and scrubbing have erased her history. Even when out shopping on her day off, she moves in a kind of automatic way. She lives for her work.
Small things take on major significance. She is inflexible, territorial, and incommunicative. In short, a royal pain in the butt. Yet she’s clearly dedicated to the Valdezes, and they respond by treating her like family. Even Raquel’s strange antagonistic relationship with the teenage daughter seems to stem from a kind of twisted familial rivalry.
Sebastián Silva, who dedicated his character study to two maids that he had while growing up, creates a fly-on-the-wall intimacy with and clear fondness for his subject with handheld camerawork and flawlessly naturalistic performances from his cast. He captures the humour in Raquel’s obsessive behaviour, although probably leaves enough scope for Raquel to open up later and quietly transform after an unexpected turn of events.
The tone is interesting. There’s a sense of everything being quite ordinary yet slightly off-kilter, that the action could detour anytime into something more extreme. Instead Silva merely teases with elements of genre filmmaking. What remains is a restrained, humorous, and, latterly, a gently uplifting piece about a working class woman’s renaissance.
The theme of birth and motherhood is tackled in Rodrigo Garcia's drama Mother and Child (4th) a drama that weaves together the experiences of three separate women. The film has been heaped with praised for navigating the clichés that come with such territory and wringing great performances from Annette Bening as a middle-aged woman who still obsesses about the baby daughter she gave up for adoption 37 years ago, that daughter played by Naomi Watts as a hardened, ambitious lawyer, and Kerry Washington as a woman desperate to have a child, even if it means adopting.
Finally, Oliver Stone proves once again to be a lightning rod for controversy with his latest project South of the Border (out on the 25th), a documentary that started as a profile of Venezuela president and champion of popular socialism Hugo Chavez and ended up being a glowing portrait of South American leadership and critique of the US mainstream media.