Latin American Women Filmmakers by Deborah Martin Deborah Shaw

Author:Deborah Martin, Deborah Shaw [Deborah Martin, Deborah Shaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350244252
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

The films

The most obvious films to mention when presenting an overview are those that have the terms ‘maids’ or ‘domestic servants’ in their title. The co-directed Domésticas/Maids by Meirelles and Olival (2001) is perhaps the work that initiated the spate of films in the genre. It is a social comedy that focuses entirely on the stories of five maids in São Paulo, and it is significant that we see only this usually marginalised group and not their employers. The film presents social commentary in a comic format, and viewers witness their hopes, dreams, frustrations and anger. Despite the presence of Meirelles, this was a small film with limited film festival release. A film that follows in the tradition with a near identitical title is Gabriel Mascaro’s Doméstica/Housemaids (2012), a Brazilian documentary made from the work of seven adolescents who were asked to film their maids over seven days. Doméstica presents the ways in which the maids illustrate the ‘dialectic of intimacy and distance’ described by Ally (2015: 51), as they are both subordinate to and part of the family unit.7

This dialectic also conditions the relationships in Sebastián Silva’s La nana/The Maid (2009), the most commercially successful and widely distributed of these films. It considers the complexities in the power relations between servants and the served and the hierarchies within the servant classes. La nana focuses on Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), who has worked as a domestic servant for an upper-class Chilean family for 20 years, and explores her confused status as servant and ‘one of the family’, and the power base she has established from an ostensibly subservient position. This is interrogated through Raquel’s hostile reactions towards the domestic workers the family employs to help her when she appears to be suffering from ill health, with the intra-class conflicts highlighting Raquel’s emotional insecurity and ultimately precarious position within the family.

Two other recent films deal with the way class, individual politics and personal identities interact to condition the relationship between employers and their maids. The Mexican Hilda by Andrés Clariond examines a crisis experienced by wealthy employer Susana LeMarchand (Verónica Langer) that arises due to tensions between her condition as bourgeois housewife and her Marxist past. The irreconcilability of the two positions results in mental health problems. These are manifested in her obsessive relationship with her maid, Hilda (Adriana Paz) and desire that they be friends, which results in a form of incarceration as Susana paradoxically attempts to impose equality while denying Hilda her freedom.8 A film that deals with an inverse power dynamic is told in comic form by the little-known Panamanian Chance (Benaim, 2009), which secured limited festival release. This tells the story of two domestic servants who, fed up with ill treatment and lack of pay, take control of the mansion where they work and take their employers hostage.

The previously mentioned contradiction between Marxist politics and everyday power relations is also explored in Rodrigo Moreno’s Réimon (2014). This film explores class contradictions through its focus on a Marxist bourgeois family’s relationship with their maid.

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