Up at the crack of dawn. Put on your uniform. Get the children ready for school. Breakfast in bed for the parents. Make lunches. See the kids off to school.
Sounds like a thrilling morning, doesn’t it?
This is the daily ritual of Raquel, the title character in Chilean director Sebastian Silva’s film “La nana,” which translates to “The maid,” a movie which is as entertaining as it is frustrating. Raquel’s work does not end with the kids, though. Silva films every aspect of the maid’s duties, from scrubbing down the bathrooms to preparing the Valdez family dinner.
The story line is easy enough: After 23 years of working as a live-in maid for the same family, Raquel is content with her household role, but something’s missing in her life. New maids, hired to help Raquel cope with the burden of overseeing an entire house, only exacerbate the problem.
The story gets its major external conflicts and comedy from the maid wars. Silva, who also wrote the screenplay of the film, makes sure to punctuate the film’s monotony with occasional comedic exclamation points. In one scene, after locking new maid Mercedes out of the house, Raquel stuffs the family’s newly adopted kitten into a large desk drawer to hide it from Mundo Valdez, the father, who just arrives to pick up his golf clubs.
Raquel’s behavior is shocking, and although I can sympathize with her struggles, I still find the way she acts to be annoying.
The film’s largest problem is that it is uninteresting. I can care about Raquel’s psychological instability all I want or be troubled by the awkward dynamic of having a lower-class maid living in an aristocratic household. As the film’s tagline reads, “She’s more or less family.”
There is depth and complexity to the characters and the story. However, I only moderately care ““ not because Raquel is a normally captivating subject but because Silva forces me to by focusing his lens on her.
Even if I find the whole notion of “La nana” to be boring, I can still appreciate the movie’s filmic elements.
Silva films the movie in a slightly better-than-normal home-video style. The film quality is grainy, and the camera captures people either in close-up, crammed shots or scenes that picture the entire Valdez family.
The camera pans quickly around group shots in the same way a mother might brusquely swing the camera as she interviews each family member on summer vacation. This cinematic style reinforces that this movie focuses on a small-scale family problem: a maid who needs help in her professional and personal life.
One of the movie’s most interesting stylistic choices was to use absolutely no non-diegetic sounds. This means that the audience hears exactly what the actors hear on-screen.
No poppy soundtrack plays over montages of Raquel humorously dealing with the travails of being a maid. There is only the sound of running water, scrubbing bristles against porcelain and the snap of yellow rubber cleaning gloves. This simplicity allowed me to draw my own conclusions about a certain scene’s significance or theme as opposed to being influenced by an emotionally charged song.
“La nana” is a good film. It profiles a job that most people do not care about, and it does it in an engaging style. Silva has a good sense of comedic timing and spacing; he always knows when he needs to break up the film’s seriousness. Still, it cannot be helped that nothing really interesting happens. Except for a sequence at Lucy’s house and a scene in a Santiago fashion boutique, the camera stays at the Valdez home and watches Raquel in her domestic routine.
Sounds like a thrilling movie, doesn’t it?
““ Daniel Boden
E-mail Boden at
dboden@media.ucla.edu.