A low budget art house film stretching the envelop in comedic drama. Hilarity and insanity in the world of the workaday
Writer/director Sebastián Silva scored big at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival bagging the Grand Jury Prize for World Dramatic Cinema for this inside look at a woman with a work ethic as big as a whale. He took Catalina Saavedra along for the ride, too, as she grabbed the Special Jury Prize for acting. Saavedra plays Raquel, the maid who for at least two decades has been a fixture in the upper-middle class household in Santiago, Chile. Raquel has watched the children grow up while their father compulsively played golf and assembled ship models and their mother pursued her career and rich social life. Raquel had no hobbies and no social life. Her duty was her only life.
The plot gets prickly, and grotesquely funny, when Raquel suffers a mid-life crisis after 23 years of more or less running the house and home. It is as if something inside her is sounding the alarm that it is time to come out, but she has no ability to let it out or even know what it is. She is like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank in the “The Truman Show” a captive of her own making; in the process of being driven mad by a lack of stimulus and completely lacking in the tools needed to experience the outside world.
Her headaches worsen until she is on the verge of collapse. We are left guessing if she has a brain tumor or some kind of extremely severe behavior disorder.
This is a crisis of huge proportions as she slowly loses her grip on everything she has worked for. The midpoint of the film develops one of the most touching and deeply saddening sequences in which she finally alienates her last loyal and affectionate friend in the family, the son. Surely this is rock bottom for her as she is on the verge of losing everything of value in a lifetime of work and we in the audience are shaken to our shoes by the possibility that this is what awaits us, too, in our old age. Insanity and hatred are the apparent spoils of years of loving dedication.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall the family brings in the first of three maids to help Raquel. While we in the audience are feeling relief Raquel reacts like a cat being held under water in a burlap bag. She is sure the act of her replacement is the last step before euthanasia. What follows is one of the most genuine, touching and, at times, raucously funny set of vignettes to come out so far this year.
One of the most amazing facets of this movie hits the viewer at about three-quarters of the way through: in playing the maid Catalina Saavedra says almost nothing in the course of the entire film. Her character remains silent to remain true to the “locked in syndrome” to which she has condemned herself. The actress is forced to liter5ally act out everything Raquel is feeling and is allowed no dialog to help things along. It is acting chops, pure and simple. The supporting actors with their conventional scripted lines slowly fade into the distance as we are absorbed into Raquel’s mind and forced to feel her every fear; forced to watch as the doors threaten to close on her life.
Raquel declares a sort of holy war on her replacements and attempts to drive them out of the house to prove in some way that her turf is inviolable. During this part of the film it transforms into the most amazing combination of Laurel and Hardy type exploits; a TV situation comedy influenced by Lucille Ball combined with psychotic events of epic proportions in the spirit of Sylvia Plath and “The Bell Jar.”
In the end it is only third replacement maid Lucy (played by award winning Mariana Loyola) who can confront Raquel with her bottomless loneliness. But even her efforts may or may not be enough to bring the heroine out of the depths and into the light of day.
A great production with sincere values done with a tight budget and a feeling heart, “The Maid” is a credit to the superlative acting of Catalina Saavedra and the great directing of emerging film maker Sebastián Silva.
Directed by: Sebastián Silva
Starring: Catalina Saavedra
Release: October 16, 2009
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