The Maid
DIR/ WRI: Sebastián Silva • PRO: Gregorio González • DOP: Sergio Armstrong • ED: Danielle Fillios • CAST: Catalina Saavedra, Claudia Celedón, Alejandro Goic
Complex and indescribable movies tend to encourage the creation of new genre monikers, to define the indefinable. For Sebastián Silva’s The Maid it’s ‘dramedy’ – apparently a combination of comedy and drama, which though describing what the movie delivers, reduces it to a simplistic level that doesn’t accord with its multifaceted character study. What the acclaimed The Maiddoes, more than anything else, is present a fly-on-the-wall insight into one woman’s personal journey from living death to a semblance of a life – challenging our expectations at every turn.
We are introduced to the morose Raquel as she eats alone in the kitchen, with sounds of the family in the background loudly enjoying their dinner. Suddenly they begin to whisper and Raquel’s stony face betrays a touch of fear, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. It becomes clear that it is her birthday, and the family are lighting candles on a cake. But when they call her in, she must be dragged there unwillingly, and she barely smiles as she takes the presents, before retiring to her kitchen to clean up after their feast. In her lonely room, she later discards the somewhat inappropriate presents to the floor. A phone call from her mother shows a fractured relationship – short and monotone and without any betrayal of affection. Naturally, we want to identify with Raquel – she is the servant in a large home working for a rich family, and is clearly tired and overworked. However, the family is kind and loving – showing fondness for their taciturn live-in maid, and making constant overtures for her affection, defying our wish to despise their pampered lives.
As Raquel becomes sick, (from overuse of cleaning products in cramped environments), the family hires a succession of girls to help around the house – taking away Raquel’s one area of control in her life. There is certainly black comedy to be had in her treatment of these usurpers – throwing cats over fences, locking them in the front garden, framing them for household breakages – but the real revelation comes in the form of Lucy, a vivacious woman who finally confronts the pain behind the sabotage. From here on in, the film is uncomfortable viewing – we are undeniably faced with the true tragedy of a 41-year-old woman who has never lived a life outside of caring for this oblivious family. Though they treat her well, it is a life of slavery nonetheless – alarm clock ringing every morning, cleaning the same corridors, scrubbing their stains from sheets, raising children that are not her own, and serving them their dinner each evening before retiring alone to her kitchen.
Having entered their service 20 years previously, she is a woman frozen in time, and has never developed beyond young adulthood. Viewed as such, the pathos of her arguments with the daughter of the household become more poignant, as it appears less the raging of an old maid, and more a suppressed lament to a lost life. Similarly, her attempts to mimic the only ‘adult’ in her life – her boss – in the clothes she purchases on her days off become horrifyingly sad images of a woman caught in stasis, especially as we are then confronted with the daily zip-up of her plain uniform before she limps upstairs to deliver their breakfast in bed.
It is with great viewing relief that Lucy begins to open Raquel up for us, allowing a sense of the real person behind the closed and guarded Catalina Saavedra’s implacable features. Saavedra creates a composite Raquel for us, enticing with occasional glimmers of life, before shutting down the expressive barriers time and time again – the fight within her wordless, but constant, and subtly visible with each turn of her cheek. Indeed, her eventual breakdown is so closely filmed and beautifully acted that it’s difficult not to feel implicit in her degradation, and rejoice in her ultimate ability to find strength and compassion.
The Maid is an amazingly acted and beautifully presented view into that most ubiquitous, yet grotesque, of Latin American institutions – the live-in maid. It opens up a microcosmic world of pain, endurance and silent suffering, but leaves us with the possibility that it can sometimes end with a modicum of happiness, and a glimmer of hope.
Sarah Griffin
Rated 16 (see IFCO website for details)
The Maid is released on 27th August 2010
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Category: Cinema Reviews, Reviews
