The ties that bind a live-in maid to the family for whom she has worked for over 20 years are coming unstuck in this agile, funny and deeply perceptive psychological drama. Best International Feature, Sundance 2009.
Silva gives the live-in at this excellent film's center a complexity normally reserved for the masters.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2009
The Maid 2008
La nana
The ties that bind a live-in maid to the family for whom she has worked for over twenty years are coming unstuck in this agile, genre-shifting psychological drama. Catalina Saavedra is riveting as the emotionally undernourished Raquel, eager to please one moment, baleful and jealous the next. Turning 41, she wavers between the conviction that she’s a valued family member and the temptations that come her way to undermine the increasingly churlish teenage children who were once her darlings. Raquel’s passive-aggressive household subterfuges are exacerbated to blackly funny effect by her employers' insensitivity in engaging another maid to help her out. The winner of the Sundance World Cinema dramatic competition grand jury prize as well as an acting award for Saavedra, Sebastián Silva’s film provides a richly detailed, entertainingly impolite, ultimately rather sympathetic picture of Latin American privilege and its discontents. — BG