THE MAID
I’ve always known people who had maids but I’ve never had one, so there is a way in which I’ll never understand the relationship. Of the people I remember growing up, usually the made was a brown person working for a white family, where the mother didn’t even have a job. I just couldn’t understand, for the life of me, why these people couldn’t clean their own houses. Of course, I have a much better understanding now and this film, without being overtly polemical, tries to get at the consequences of the imbalance of power at the heart of all master/servant situations. Perhaps the most significant being the ways in which servants are never really seen as really fully realized people.
In this instance Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) is the live in maid for the Valdez family and has been so for 20 years. At her birthday party she has to be coaxed to uncomfortably partake in cake and presents. She has a typically co-dependent relationship with the mother Pilar (Claudia Celedon) who, as an intellectual from an upper class family, makes some efforts to treat her equally but is trapped in a conundrum. The children range from the oldest daughter who is in endless conflict with Raquel, to the teenage son who is being constantly called out and embarassed by her. Due to some health problems, the family attempts to bring in some help for Raquel in the form of first, Mercedes (Mercedes Villaneuva) and then Sonia (Anita Reeves.) Raquel’s strange and comedic underminings drive them out. When Raquel becomes ill, however, Lucy (Mariana Loyola) arrives and answers her jealousy with humor and care.
The film presents a true tour-de-force performance by Ms. Saavedra, a very experienced theatre, film and TV actress in Chile, who has also played a lot of maids. With her constantly grim expression and her adolescent acting out, she manages to have us laughing while at the same time feeling her pain and alienation, and thus coming to understand very bizarre behavior. It’s all about the maid here, the family doesn’t come off terribly well: mostly quite spoiled and unaware that this person who lives in their house, has no life apart from them, even though they don’t really invite her to be a part of theirs.
The director, Sebastian Silva, wanted to make the film because he grew up in a house with a live-in-maid who he instinctively rebelled against. He says he just couldn’t figure out why this person, who wasn’t a part of the family, got to boss him around. So he decided to explore this “anthropological” problem as he calls it: the maid who has no life and the consequences thereof. He even went so far as to shoot the film in the house he grew up in: so, for example, Raquel’s room is really the maid’s room, tiny as it is.
I don’t know but I can hope that a film like this will ask the very affluent and well educated types of individuals who see foreign films to investigate their own rationales for “needing” household servants and for therefore perpetuating the idea of the rightness of such class divisions. In my neck of the woods, I see maids climbing up steep hills to cater to the whims of the superrich. Maybe they could be persuaded to at least, give them a ride.
The Maid opens October 23, 2009.
Directed by Sebastian Silva; written by Sebastian Silva and Pedro Peirano; produced by Gregorio Gonzalez; Director of Photography, Sergio Armstrong; edited by Anielle Fillios. Released by Elephant Films. Running time: 94 minutes.
With: Catalina Saavedra (Raquel); Claudia Celedon (Pilar); Alejandro Goic (Mundo); Andrea Garcia-Huidobro (Camila); Mariana Loyola (Lucy); and Agustin Silva (Lucas).
