Salina Art Center

Many Americans are a bit leery of live-in servants. The idea makes us more class conscious than we really want to be; it seems undemocratic, somehow. Maybe that’s why American films featuring butlers, chambermaids, chauffeurs, et al., frequently portray these characters as devious, manipulative, untrustworthy types who harbor vengeance against their masters and mistresses (or display over-protective dedication to their employers). Other cultures are more comfortable with the idea of “servitude,” and their cinematic depictions of master-servant relationships can be quite eye-opening for Americans. Such a film is The Maid, directed by Sebastián Silva. The title character, played by Catalina Saavedra, is part of a complex family dynamic within an upper middle class household in Chile. Raquel (Saavedra) has served the Valdez family for over 20 years, and she’s like a member of the family—but not quite. Very poignantly and without resorting to pathos, Silva shows how Raquel’s personality has been shaped by her limited world. Her character is a bit reminiscent of the repressed, blindly loyal manservant played by Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, except that Raquel isn’t driven by pride in her work; she’s simply fulfilling the only role she’s ever known. Saavedra’s greatest achievement is to play an intellectually and emotionally constrained person who has deeper feelings of which she’s not even conscious: rage, resentment, disappointment, and fear of a future that becomes more uncertain when her health begins to deteriorate. Raquel’s employers care about her, but they don’t understand her, nor do they see that her attention might be crossing the line between “devoted” and “possessive.”  Director and co-writer Silva doesn’t intend this lack of perception to be a statement about bourgeois callousness. Everyone means well, but gradually Raquel’s job takes a toll on her sanity (and we sense that the unraveling has been developing over a long period of time, which makes it more frightening). To help Raquel, who has been suffering lately from terrible headaches and mysterious fainting spells, the Valdez family hires a succession of younger maids to assist her with the more arduous chores. The well-intended gesture only increases Raquel’s paranoia, and she wages a rather pathetic campaign to undermine each newcomer. Though the plot summary sounds like the basis for a “Hand That Rocks the Cradle”-type thriller about a murderous domestic, rest assured The Maid isn’t that kind of film. It’s closer to black comedy, though Silva is never inhumane to his characters or holds any of them up to ridicule. The actors are universally excellent, including Claudia Celedon as the family matriarch and Mariana Loyola as Lucy, the maid whose quirkiness and eccentricity seem to make her impervious to Raquel’s scornful attempts to scare her off. It is Silva’s subtly comic direction and Catalina Saavedra’s exemplary performance, however, that give The Maid such fascinating undertones of weirdness beneath its essentially realistic surface. There are some unusual incidents, odd bits of conversation, off-the-wall responses, but everything is just slightly skewed, not so much that it makes audiences absolutely certain this is a comedy—or a horror film. Saavedra’s protagonist is recognizable and real, yet we suspect that her character could do anything, and we’re always on our guard about what it might be. Just when it seems Raquel is going in one direction as a character, the film pulls the rug out from under us; the relationship between Raquel and Lucy goes in unexpected directions as well. Yet it doesn’t seem forced or obnoxious: this mood of constant uncertainty actually provides much low-key humor, and makes Silva’s film—which earned accolades at the recent Sundance Film Festival—so fascinating. Unpredictable, witty, sharp yet ultimately compassionate, The Maid is a beguiling trip into human psychology and one of the best foreign films of the year.