The Second Mother (Brazil 2015)

Brazilian Cinema

Brazil is the most populous and country in Latin America with the largest GDP but its film industry currently ranks second to Mexico in cinema admissions and behind Argentina in terms of prestige and international profile. Where Brazil does prevail, however, is in TV production as the centre for telenovela (a type of soap opera drama) production for a large domestic and international audience.

The Second Mother is co-produced by Globo Filmes, part of Grupo Globo, one of the world’s largest media groups and also home to TV Globo, the originator of the telenovela. Some commentators have suggested that The Second Mother is in some ways a cinematic equivalent of a telenovela. As the name implies a telenovela is a ‘long-form drama’, a novel in the form of a hundred TV episodes. Telenovelas cover a wide range of topics but some are certainly concerned with the after effects of colonialism – social class divisions and inequalities – and others focus on contemporary social issues which interest a mass audience.

The maid and nanny in post-colonial Latin America

There are several major themes in the ‘New Latin American Cinema’ of the last ten years. Latin America is now the most urbanised region on the planet with 80% of the population living in cities and surrounding urban areas. Given that for many years the image of Brazil on screen often included the rain forests or the Amazon, it is certainly worth considering just how many recent films have focused on urban life. They have focused on the problems of rapid urbanisation and how these have produced shanty towns/favelas alongside modernist architecture and gated communities. Inequalities have helped to create criminal gangs and kidnappings etc. Rapidly growing populations mean housing problems and pressure on services like education.

There have been several high profile Latin American films that have focused on wealthy (often very wealthy) families and the role of the maid and/or nanny). The Second Mother is not the film’s original title (which doesn’t easily translate from the Portuguese) but Val can be seen as either the ‘second woman’ who is a mother in the wealthy household or as the woman who acts as the nanny or ‘second mother’ of the teenager in the family, Fabinho. But the title might have another meaning as well, which we’ll discuss after the screening.

The maid/nanny figure is a ‘holdover’ from the European colonial period (even though this was 200 years ago). The European élites often appointed a young woman from the ‘native’ population as first a maid then a nanny and eventually as a housekeeper. (Something similar can be found in many ex-British colonial societies such as Hong Kong, Malaysia or India.) In all cases a specific three-sided relationship between mother, nanny and son/daughter develops. In the case of Val the maid/nanny/housekeeper and her own daughter Jéssica, Val respects the traditions associated with working for a rich family but Jessica is a ‘modern’ young woman who rejects class difference – thus creating the film’s narrative drive.

Contemporary Brazil

It is noticeable that when Jessica first arrives in São Paulo, the Southern hemisphere’s largest conurbation (of 20 million people), she first announces her plan to study architecture and then hears Val’s description of ‘concreting over’ the city she remembers from earlier times.

Anna Muylaert first conceived the idea for The Second Mother and outlined a script many years ago, but changed her approach after the election of Dilma Rousseff as Brazilian President in 2011, who has subsequently given support to female filmmakers. The new script, Muylaert says, “reflected the changes and debates that were happening around me. Instead of portraying the nanny’s daughter as hapless and meek – a faulty cliché – I gave her a forceful personality, made her noble and headstrong enough to stand up to the separatist social rules grounded in Brazil’s colonial past”. It is also clear that the film’s focus is very much on the women in both the wealthy family and in Val’s own family. Women have ‘agency’ in this film.