evening1 If you enjoy family soap opera and dysfunction, as well as the chance to peep at women as they shower, this is the movie for you.Here we have the story of an attractive, privileged couple somewhere in South America, along with their squabbling children, and the series of maids who put up with them.The main nanny is Raquel, an angry and depressed woman of uncertain intelligence who has sacrificed 20 years to this clan with nothing to show for it but a cramped bedroom and a deplorable attitude.When the stress begins to get to Raquel, the woman of the house decides to get her some help. Raquel proceeds to act out almost psychopathically until one of the maids pummels her and another tries friendship.A little concern and support go a long way with Raquel and she seems to be regaining her grip by the end of the film. I didn't find this story to be that compelling, though it did keep my interest till the end.As hinted above, I resent the filmmaker's gratuitous inclusion of a breast-revealing shower shot of nearly every female in the film. He may be a voyeur; I prefer not to be.

jlau-128-340465 As a child growing up with a parent in the Domestic Service Industry, this movie was very touching and comical at the same time. So much of what happens when the family is not around and the house staff dynamics are well portrayed here. The difference is the cultural nuances that made this film so great. Some of subjects areas caught on film would never really be seen in North America Cinema. The family dynamics portrayed in the film is also very interesting. The movie has some documentary style camera angles but it is very much a look in at one persons life. I recommend this movie.

Turfseer La Nana is a Chilean film about a live-in maid, Raquel, who has been with an upper middle-class family for over twenty years. When we're first introduced to Raquel, the family is attempting to coax her out of the kitchen and into the dining room, so they can give her a birthday cake and a bunch of presents. She reluctantly joins the family but appears to be miserable and the dour expression on her face never seems to change. What's more, Raquel suffers from migraines and dizzy spells, which makes her life extra miserable.We soon learn that the mother in the family, Pilar, has hired other maids to work along side Raquel, but she wants nothing to do with them due to her conviction that they all are encroaching upon her 'territory'. Pilar has a big heart and is truly devoted to Raquel who she considers part of the family. By the same token, Pilar is an enabler, as she looks the other way whenever Raquel acts poorly. In one such incident, Pilar discovers that Raquel has etched out her teenage daughter's face in a bunch of photos Raquel keeps in a photo album. This indiscretion only results in a mild rebuke from the mother.Pilar again becomes convinced that Raquel needs help with performing the household chores so she hires three different maids in rapid succession. The first one is Mercedes, a teenager from Peru, who Raquel treats extremely shabbily. Raquel sprays disinfectant in the bathroom whenever Mercedes is about to use it and subjects her to demeaning epithets about her Peruvian origin. Mercedes has volunteered to take care of a stray cat which the children have taken in, but Raquel flips it over the wall of the house and lets it escape. Raquel then keeps locking Mercedes out of the house until the young housekeeper quits.At the behest of her own mother, Pilar now hires an older woman, Sonia, who has worked for her mother before. From the outset, Sonia makes it clear that she won't take any b.s. from Raquel. Again, Raquel locks Sonia out of the house but Sonia climbs up to the roof and manages to get herself back in. Sonia attacks Raquel who flees and hides in a nearby closet. During the altercation, Sonia accidentally breaks a model ship which the father of the family has been working on for over a year. Sonia resigns but Raquel then passes out and the family members rush her to the hospital.While recuperating, Pilar hires the third and final maid, Lucy, while Raquel remains bedridden. Fearing that her position might be jeopardized, Raquel forces herself to recuperate faster than she should, and informs Pilar she's ready to work again. Just like before, she begins treating the new maid poorly but Lucy feels sorry for Raquel and showers her with affection. When Raquel locks her out of the house, Lucy takes off her blouse and sunbathes on the front lawn. This is the turning point as Raquel suddenly finds the sight of a half-naked Lucy hysterically funny and bursts out laughing. From then on, Raquel warms up to Lucy and accepts her invitation to visit her family at Christmas time.While visiting Lucy's family, Lucy's uncle puts the moves on Raquel. At first, she welcomes him into her bed but decides not to have sex with him since she's inexperienced. After returning to the family, Lucy eventually announces that she's homesick and is leaving her job as a maid. Raquel is saddened by Lucy's announcement but is not destroyed. Lucy's influence is obvious in the final scene, as Raquel goes jogging for the first time (something that Lucy always liked to do).La Nana is a simple tale with a theme of friendship and redemption. Raquel has become selfish and vindictive and it takes the warm-hearted Lucy to bring her out of her shell (Raquel's sudden transformation from misanthrope to giving spirit wasn't very believable but was satisfying since our protagonist needs to evolve in some measure).La Nana offers little in terms of exploring the inner lives of its characters (we never get to know much about Raquel's background except for tantalizing glimpses such as a cryptic conversation with her mother over the cell phone after she decides to leave Lucy's family's home). The emphasis here is more on the external arc of the story, mainly chronicling the misadventures of the various maids who have to put up with Raquel's surly disposition.La Nana features strong performances from each actor. I question the need for nudity (which include shots of bare breasts in the shower) since it does nothing to advance the verisimilitude of the film. Finally, La Nana is not what you would call a 'psychologically dense' film, but it should keep you fairly absorbed until the end.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre This film's Spanish title "La Nana" has several possible meanings: it could be "The Grandmother" or "The Nanny" ... and the actress in the title role (Catalina Saavedra) was previously best-known for portraying a nanny in a Chilean soap opera. But the plot makes it clear that this film is "The Maid": a character study of Raquel, the live-in housemaid for a Santiago, Chile family. Raquel has been with them for 23 years:since before the younger children's births; now her forty-first birthday forces her to reappraise her life.The family are prosperous, with no explanation for their wealth. Their house has two maids' bedrooms and several family bedrooms; the exterior has a submerged swimming pool and a lush garden (though the gardener only visits weekly). One parent seems to have something to do with a local university, yet we never hear any mention of income nor business. The husband has plenty of time to build elaborate model ships.Raquel's position is awkward: she's "one of the family" when it suits the family's convenience though not otherwise. The family celebrate her birthday with a cake, and the wife announces that Raquel needn't wash the dishes tonight ... but that only means they'll be left for her tomorrow! We're told that Raquel gets a day off each week, but we never learn how she spends this nor how the family get through an entire day without her. If Raquel is receiving any actual wages besides meals and a bed, we never know. Nearly the entire film takes place on this house's grounds, giving us no real view of typical Chilean life.The narrative sets up events but gives them no pay-off. A couple of times, Raquel collapses on the job. Is this merely down to overwork, or an omen of something worse? When the family engage another maid to assist her, Raquel's bizarre behaviour seems to foreshadow mental illness. None of these ideas are developed.Actress Catalina Saavedra is impressive, and well-cast. She's stocky, clearly able to do drudgery, and she has moles on her face and neck. A prettier, more graceful actress would be less plausible in this role, since a prettier woman would possess more career options.I was intrigued at how much U.S. culture was present in this South American film. The characters sing "The Birthday Song" (in Spanish) and one family member performs "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" on piano. Two characters wear T-shirts depicting, respectively, Disney animals and the New York Giants football team (who are actually based in New Jersey).When I view a non-Anglophone film, I usually concentrate on the dialogue rather than the subtitles, since subtitles are often inaccurate and I want to improve my language skills. I have no trouble understanding Spanish spoken by Spaniards, Mexicans or Puerto Ricans, but I had difficulty following the Chilean accents on this movie's soundtrack. Part of my difficulty was down to bizarre decisions by director Sebastian Silva. "La Nana" has a couple of Robert Altman-style scenes in which several characters speak simultaneously, in rapid-fire Spanish. Oddly, throughout this film Silva stages scenes so that an actor speaks while his or her mouth is off-screen, or with head turned away from the camera, or from a distance, or while photographed through tinted glass, or even speaking while wearing a gorilla mask(!). Silva seems intent on minimising footage in which an actor's mouth needs to synch with the dialogue track. I suspect that there were two reasons for this: to save money on post-dubbing, and to encourage foreign distributors to release this film dubbed into other languages.Speaking of distributors: at several moments in this film, we glimpse female or (more rarely) male nudity that isn't relevant to the plot, and which only seems meant to give this film a better chance at receiving foreign distribution. (Any movie with a few seconds of female breasts qualifies as an "art film".)The entire film is shot with a hand-held camera that moves erratically throughout, and which becomes positively vertiginous in the final scene as Saavedra jogs through Santiago's streets. To keep her in frame and in focus, the camera operator appears to be jogging BACKWARDS directly in front of her, and the camera joggles up and down as if it's getting sea-sick. (The film was shot in 16mm and converted to 35mm.) Elsewhere, director Silva makes some strange camera decisions. When the family's teenage son Lucas (played by director Silva's younger brother) starts performing a magic trick with a handkerchief, I was eager to see the trick itself and also eager to see the boy's level of skill in performing it ... but Silva tilts the camera so that the trick is performed at the very edge of the frame, and we can't see what's happening. Later, when Lucas performs an entire magic show for his family, the camera sets this up but then cuts to an altogether different scene. (The Lucas character seems to be based on director Silva as a teenager.)Unless Chilean Spanish is significantly different from other forms of Spanish in some way I don't know about, the dialogue throughout this film contains some strange word choices. In one sequence, adults keep referring to a cat as "uno gatito" (a kitten) when it's clearly an adult feline. (UPDATE: Some correspondents have informed me that these traits are appropriate for Chilean Spanish.)Normally, when I see impressive work by an actor, director or screenwriter previously unknown to me, I state in my review that I look forward to more work by that person. "La Nana" shows talent and ability on the part of writer/director Silva and actress Saavedra: I'm glad that I've seen this film, and I would happily view more work by either or both of them. However, nothing here engaged me enough to make me want to seek out more of Silva's or Saavedra's work. My rating for "The Maid": 6 out of 10.