Film Festival 09 - The Maid
The Maid
La nana, Chile 2008, 96m
Director: Sebastián Silva
Festivals: Sundance, New Directors/New Films 2009
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 under-nourished 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 employer's insensitivity in employing 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. - Bill
Gosden
In Spanish with English subtitles
