The Maid

Sebastiàn Silva’s very funny 'The Maid,' while hardly approving of its well-off characters, is one of the few films to take aim on the long-suffering staff or at least not paint them as a noble salt-of-the-earth type

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Nov. 10, 2009

Picture it: a wealthy bourgeois family in Chile. Their longtime live-in housekeeper.

The usual result of a coupling like this is a dig at the upper class, particularly given the chasmic class gap in its home nation. And yet Sebastiàn Silva’s very funny The Maid, while hardly approving of its well-off characters, is one of the few films to take aim on the long-suffering staff or at least not paint them as a noble salt-of-the-earth type.

To wit: Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) is a miserable, painkiller-addicted malcontent, whose constant expression after 20-plus years of living with the same household is a pissy scowl. Introduced blithely ignoring her employers’ cheerful calls to come to the living room to celebrate her own 41st birthday, Raquel is both one of the family and still an outsider—held to some semblance of employer-employee ritual but basically free to be as unpleasant as she wishes.

As her work starts to slip (and after playing petty mind games with the teenaged daughter), she’s informed she’s overworked enough to require an assistant. So displeased is Raquel that, to retain her power within the household, she childishly taunts and tortures a revolving door cast of new servants, including locking them outside and, in one case, subjecting them to a full-on smackdown.

There’s only one way this could go: redemption, specifically at the hands of a maid (Mariana Loyola) who proves not so easy to push around. To its credit, Raquel’s Journey to Becoming a Better Person isn’t quite as definitive as you’d think, and relatively painless to boot.

It helps that our lead has been perfectly cast. Without ever crossing the line into outright unlikable, Saavedra brings us a character who suffers, genuinely, movingly, from very real class discomfort but who actively repels our pity. Her Raquel will not be condescended to with pathos for the working (wo)man, freeing her to explore and augment her character’s hilarious dark streak.

She wouldn’t be out of place in a film by Japanese director Shohei Imamura—a filmmaker who made a career out of depicting the horrors inflicted upon lower classes while dispelling the cliche of them as more “real” than regular people. As a whole The Maid itself isn’t quite as good as Imamura, but crafting a mighty strong protagonist is a good place to start one’s promising career as any. B

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