The Maid: Domestic Disturbance

When, increasingly overloaded with work, she literally falls ill, her sympathetic employers insist on hiring some temporary help. Naturally, Raquel rebels by sabotaging her relief, revealing herself to be petty, vindictive, and proprietary – not surprising, given that her entire sense of self-worth is bound up in her job. She’s over 40, has no friends and no life, and is both obsessed with and depressed by the daily rituals of the household.

Raquel is subtly played by Catalina Saavedra, who won the Breakthrough Actress award at Sundance last year, and she carefully both hides and reveals the inner and external contradictions of her character. Although her anger and unhappiness bubble to the surface in various acts of passive-aggressive unkindness, she is not exactly oppressed and alienated in the traditional Marxist sense. Indeed, Raquel is complicit in constructing the barriers between herself and the family with whom she lives and works.

Nevertheless, Raquel’s keen awareness of the social distance between her existence and that of her employers is not imaginary, a point driven home by her employer’s mother’s demeaning commentary on managing “the help.” Tradition, Catholicism, and a well-defined social hierarchy exist silently as essential elements of the mise-en-scène.

Raquel holds fast to her “privileged” position and clings to their appreciation, yet is inwardly disgusted by reminders of her lengthy servitude, such as the staged birthday party, the inexpensive sweater provided as a gift, and even the obvious self-confidence and attractiveness of the eldest daughter, who occupies a special category of resentment.

The film will no doubt be both mysteriously enticing and appalling to North American audiences, who sanctimoniously reify the middle class to which we all claim to belong, despite differences in income and occupation. Silva deftly invites the viewer into the life of the live-in domestic, and the film displays all the trappings of Chilean economic success and modernity, although almost entirely shot within familiar interior spaces – the kitchen, hallways, and bedrooms of the family home.

However, as the processes of economic and cultural globalization cause the developed and the developing world to more comfortably coincide alongside and inside one another, such domestic dramas could just as easily be imagined in New York’s Upper East Side or the wealthier neighbourhoods of urban Canada, such as Westmount, Shaughnessy, or Rosedale.