Director Sebastián Silva’s second movie The Maid (La Nana), now out on DVD release, made a low-key debut at the Sundance Film Festival back in January 2009 and ended up walking away with a Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema category, as well as another award for the performance by its star, Catalina Saavedra. It then played a number of other festivals, winning similar awards in Mexico and Columbia.
The film is about long-time maid Racquel, who feels innately a part of the Valdez family after 23 years of service helping to maintain their household, and helping to raise their children. Though she is squarely a part of the household, there are barriers. Silvia talks about the the film.
She’s More Or Less Family…
The Maid is a very emotional film for me. I can narrow it to one sentence – “She’s more or less family.” It’s that ambiguity. It has to do with struggling with not being able to love or be loved. Neither the maid nor the people in the household know where they stand in terms of emotional connection or affection.
Raquel in the film is sort of like a lost soul in economic need that comes to this bourgeois family in this third world country at a very young age. That's what they say at the beginning of the film – “Raquel, you've been here for over 20 years now. You came here one year before Camilla.” She got there when she was so young and is from such a totally different background that she has been slowly crushed and absorbed by this upper middle class family’s values and ethics.
For 20 years she's been operating from a 16 or 17 year old’s emotional intelligence and just been going slowly crazy. She doesn't have a social life at all. I used to wonder if the maid in our house was as mean to me as she was just because she hasn’t had sex in twenty years!
Before Lucy comes Raquel’s strongest relationship is with the mother of the house. It's a professional sort of thing but here's an emotional, profound bond between them. It’s co-dependency – it’s just not out there in the open because they're from different social backgrounds. I think that's how people are with their jobs sometimes. It's rare when a boss in this type of situation, meaning the mother, would sit down with the maid and have like a very deep conversation over a glass of wine together.
In the US, people will hire a nanny that will come for the day or whatever, but here an au pair or a nanny will often share a similar cultural or social background with the family they work for. She probably has studied something or she wants to study something, she has friends and she's got a life. And either way a cleaning lady or a nanny who comes for a day or three times a week is just doing a job, you know? What I’m portraying is the maid that lives with the family and works with them 24-7. In Chile it’s more of an anthropological problem. They're like nuns - the uniform, the work, the little room, hopefully a TV, and that’s it. That kind of life can really ruin your emotional intelligence.
On casting…
Both Catalina who of course plays Raquel and Claudia who plays Pilar worked on my first film La Vida Me Mata and I developed the script with them in mind. Claudia is my old, old friend, hates TV and has never done anything she knew she wouldn’t be proud of. Catalina has done a lot of theater but she’s also been on Chilean TV soap operas, and sitcoms playing small roles for years She's a very serious actress but she she's not afraid of losing her dignity. She doesn't give a shit. She's got a son and she needs to feed him so she'll just do whatever she has to.
When I first thought about writing "The Maid" and pursuing the project I thought of her as the main character right away. But when I called her and I offered her the job, initially she said, “fuck you, man. I've done too many maids!”'
She actually has portrayed like 17 different maids in sitcoms and soap operas. The maids on TV in Chile are always these girls showing their boobs and are just sort of silly characters. I told her, “I'm sorry, you're just the perfect one for this role. I promise you this is going to be a different kind of maid.”
On writing the screenplay with his ex-boyfriend…
I co wrote the screenplay with my ex-boyfriend Pedro Peirano, who is a very well-known writer in Chile, and has done some very good cult TV shows. Catalina was pretty excited about that, so she agreed to read the script when we were done. Finally she said, “I love the screenplay, I like Pedro, I like you, I loved La Vida Me Mata,” and she was in it.
Pedro and I argued a lot about the scene when the mother sees the scratched pictures. It's really in your face and scary and a little risky to do that because it's kind of like you may enter into another genre. It's something that’s more in the direction of a suspense or thriller kind of story. American audiences and people who haven't really dealt with a live-in maid or someone living and working in their house full time tend to assume that the film is going to go somewhere else during that scene. But we never thought that there was that thriller tension with her. I never expected that audiences would think that the maid might kill someone when we were writing that scene and none of us thought of that while shooting the film. Since Raquel is sort of based on real people, I knew that character would never get really violent with anybody.
The humor in The Maid is not based on jokes. For me comedies are really hard to watch when they're defined as comedies because you know they're going to try to make you laugh. I prefer it when the humor in a script or film makes you nervous and tense and laughter is just one possible reaction. There are just these human, uncomfortable situations in life. It’s like the scene of Sonya going up to the roof. It's a little off but she's so tough and it's totally possible. It's kind of outrageous and it's kind of crazy but I like the tone that that scene gives to the film.
Location, location…
We shot the film in my family house. What you see on screen is where I grew up. Raquel’s room was the maid's real room down to the side table and the covers on the bed. All the decoration is the maid's decoration. The kitchen, the parents' room –everything that you see in the film was the way it was when I lived there. It felt so good to shoot it there. Since it was my family house, we could spend as much time as we wanted beforehand to do some sketching and storyboarding and camera blocking so we could run a lot of long takes. That really helped out. It made us go so much faster in production and we were able to shoot the film very cheaply in just 16 days.
The sis-mance between Raquel and Lucy…
The obsession Raquel has with Lucy could maybe fall into a sort of a sexual thing but I think it’s more that Raquel's in love with Lucy and worships Lucy. She needs her. It's more emotional than erotic. It’s like she's her first friend. Lucy's the only person that has embraced her and cried with her in her life. Raquel begins depending on Lucy. She needs her and wants to be with her. You can see in the way that she prepares the breakfast for her. She looks so devoted to her and she wants to make her happy in such a childish way. I think that's the tension between them. I don't really think Raquel would ever kiss her on the lips or touch her… But yes, she might spy on her. Maybe if Lucy is talking on the phone Raquel would be listening. It's that kind of obsession.
If I were to see the film for the first time and I don't know anything about it, I would say Raquel was a virgin. So and then she has the chance to have sex with this man and she refuses it. And I think it's not because she's a lesbian, I think it's because she's just afraid of sex and afraid of masculinity and afraid of that world because she is so inexperienced. She's not ready to begin.
The fight scene with Sonya [another maid in the film], also reveals something that Raquel had never been exposed to - physical violence. Locking the doors, the cat, the vacuum - she’s always been passive aggressive and never really physical until she fights with Sonya. And when Raquel locks Lucy out and then discovers her sunbathing topless, it’s a total provocation.
Lucy knows that she’s going to shock her. She wins her over by shocking her and confronting her.
The Maid is out on UK release on 27th August
