The Maid

This film, which earned Sundance awards and critics voted #33 for 2009, turns out to be quite the home movie.  Sebastián Silva shot it in his parents’ home, and gets his younger brother to play his adolescent self, in a story about the two maids with whom he grew up.  It’s set in Santiago but could be anywhere in Latin America where “maid culture” is prevalent (cf. Lucrecia Martel’s Argentina).  Raquel (Catalina Saavedra, in a deservedly-honored performance) has served in this family for 23 of her 41 years.  She’s an indispensable but cranky part of the family.  On the brink of exhaustion, she refuses offers from the lady of the house to get more help, and when first a young Peruvian girl and then a tough old bird are brought in anyway, they are quickly dispatched by the scheming Raquel.  But she meets her match in Lucy (the other maid in the Silva household), who disarms her with sheer good feeling.  There are times when you think this film is going in the direction of boiling cats and crazed revenge, but it always remains rooted in real human behavior and genuine domestic drama.  It’s no more a comedy than a thriller.  A sardonic humor is always implicit, but subsumed in rather grim psychological and social specificity, and the uplift at the end is modest and well-earned.  Silva says that when he showed the finished film to the real Raquel and Lucy, the former laughed and the latter cried all the way through.  You may do some of both, or just quietly admire life as it’s really lived.  (2009, dvd)  *7*  (MC-82)     

Already I’m arguing with myself over my “Best of 2009” list.  When I went to place this Chilean gem on the list, I saw there was really little difference among the foreign films between the recommended and the highly so, aside from the plus I gave the latter in the mood of the moment.  The rankings may be idiosyncratic, but the list adds up to an impressive array of world cinema, well worth the effort to find and to watch.  To which The Maid must certainly be added.