La nana / The Maid

To be a live-in maid / nanny to one family for over twenty years, as Catalina Saavedra’s Raquel has been in Sebastián Silva’s subtle and sneaky second film, is to work and have worked a shitty, demanding, confoundingly repetitive, and often quietly humiliating job upon which you not only come to depend for your livelihood and physical security, but for yr sense of belonging, home, personal self-value, and emotional wellbeing. It is an indentured servitude that doubly imprisons by imposing the most desperate form of psychic need upon its entrapped practitioner. La nana, an autobiographical film based on Silva’s childhood (his younger brother plays his teenage self), shot in his family’s Chilean home, dedicated to his two childhood maids, approaches this perilous lifestyle w/ a deeper, more restrained understanding than any film about the baffling socioeconomic and psychological polarities of living w/ and/or as household help than any I have ever seen, and is so unique in its doing so that it cannot help but sieve much of the business of its meaning-making from the audience expectations that it implicitly subverts. From the beginning of the film, Catalina Saavedra’s jerky, nervous, tick-laden performance and halfway malevolent forty-one-year-old-virgin gaze set us up to expect the worst; some sort of cathartic aberration; some good ol’ ultraviolent bourgeois comeuppance; a calamitous return of repressed libidinal energy in the form of a raucous reprisal. The literary and cinematic depiction of maids has often focused on repression, alienation, and dispossession leading to rebellion, abjection, madness, and murder. The master narrative for these maid tales is the case of the Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. Jean Genet used the story as the launching-pad for his theatrical masterpiece, The Maids, first performed in 1947. It has gone on to directly influence films such as Les Abysses (’63) by Nikos Papatakis, Claude Chabrol’s 1995 masterpiece La cérémonie, Jean-Pierre Denis’ Les blessures assassins / Murderous Maids (’00), among other works of cinema, theater, literature, and reportage. (Unrelated masterpieces like Joseph Losey’s The Servant ('63), Buñuel’s Le journal d'une femme de chamber (’64), and Pasolini’s Teorema, have likewise used personal servants as standing-reserves for violent, subversive destabilization of erstwhile calm zones of domestic upper-middle-class placidity w/ their immanent and corrosive play of sublimated power relations). Saaverda’s performance and the way the filmmakers isolate and underscore her odd, increasingly pathological behavior – complete w/ migraine headaches, blackouts, attacks, and spells of glassy aphasia – present us w/ a woman quite clearly on the brink of physical and emotional collapse. While this is indeed the crux of the situation, La nana doesn’t use her as a cog in a diaphanous discursive machinery of class schism. Instead it renders her as a woman in a complex situation of servitude and neediness, who struggles to meet these unconscious needs and has to confront the fear that her piece of security, a security that has been carved out for her conditionally, can be taken away from her at any moment if she is no longer seen as of use. Any form of change is, in fact, a possible threat to this partial, compromised zone of dependence and abnegation as both-part-of-and-not-a-part-of another family w/ its own unsteady dynamics. Even the two growing teenagers – he regularly spunking up his bedsheets and pajamas and she flowering into a self-possessed, confrontational adult whose face Raquel has thusly carved spookily out of her collection of family photos – threaten her already loosening grip on a status quo that she perceives as desperately necessary to her physical and spiritual survival and to which she clings like a territorial surrogate-mother bear at war w/ chronos. Her kindly mistress proves understanding, but when her solution to the ongoing dilemma is to hire another maid to help Raquel out, the already problematic maid goes even further off the rails, desperate not to lose any ground: she makes short work of the first assistant, an innocent, guileless Peruvian name Mercedes, whom she browbeats and locks out of the house, disinfecting the entire bathroom each time the poor young thing takes a shower; a second maid, Sonia, is brought in – mean, coarse, and built like a brick shithouse – but she quits too after the two maids come to blows, Sonia also having been locked out of the house (and having consequently injured herself climbing over it); finally, after she collapses in front of her benefactors, a third auxiliary maid named Lucy enters the picture during Raquel’s consequent convalescence, and everything changes in a way that we do not see coming and which, in its heartwarming unraveling, makes of our cynical, condescending expectations an object of ridicule. Lucy is a sweet, engaging and sympathetic woman who refuses to be chastened by Raquel’s passive-aggressive hardheadedness, insisting her way through the older woman’s force field, taking being locked out of the house as an opportunity to sunbathe naked, befriending Raquel, loving her, listening to her, coaxing her. Mariana Loyola’s performance in the role of Lucy stands in stark disjunction w/ Saavedra’s – hers is reminiscent of a Chilean riff on Sally Hawkins’s infectious performance-as-workable-lifestyle-ethic turn in Happy-Go-Lucky – but even more perfectly modulated and surprising in terms of where it takes the film. Given an opportunity to be heard, a space in which compassion can open her up to a new acceptance of life on life’s terms, and a locus for transference aided by tenderness, Raquel emerges slowly and cautiously from her fog, like a wounded animal into a clearing. Lucy, who is only passing through and likes it that way, allows Raquel to giver herself away so that she may receive herself back, become alive to herself, no longer defined simply as an precarious adjunct to a family that just won’t stay still, a position she disdains and depends upon in a maddening and untenable day-to-day paradox that has up until this point been closing in on her, shutting her down. The final shot of the film is of Raquel, enacting the transference in real bodily terms, taking up the now-moved-on Lucy’s habit of jogging w/ earphones, locked into her own flesh, her own psychic and biological autonomy, smiling as she roves gingerly out into the world, content in herself of having a self. The film, then, is about how the right person entering her desperate, sad life at the exact right moment, makes it okay for Raquel to feel okay. Of course this is how this story goes. And we should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.