The Chambermaid (La camarista, Mexico 2018)

This UK release from the always reliable New Wave distribution company has been gathering a great deal of support from UK critics and programmers. It is certainly an impressive film but I do wonder what audiences are making of it. There are currently only three responses on IMDb, two of which are negative, but the ‘User Ratings’ suggest a very positive response. I’m struggling to find words to describe my own overall response and I’ll try to be as objective as possible.

As the title suggests, the film focuses on Evella (‘Eve’), a chambermaid in a 5 star hotel in Mexico City. Eve is a 24 year-old Indigenous woman who has clearly made good progress in her time at the hotel. She is now responsible for the 21st floor and has her sights set on the 42nd floor, the penthouse suite. Later we will learn that she has a small boy being looked after by a child-minder and that a further promotion will help her pay for this child care and to find more suitable accommodation in the city. The narrative doesn’t actually move out of the hotel until the final scene and all we know about Eve’s life outside work is gleaned from the phone calls she manages to make to the child-minder.

The writer-director Lila Avilés (b. 1982) has a background in theatre, TV and film, writing, directing, producing and acting. She has formed her own film production company which carries this statement on its website:

Limerencia Films is a Mexican independent film producer founded by Lila Avilés and the film La Camarista. Limerencia Films intends to continue producing author films with deep themes, searching new cinematographic narratives with international projection. Avilés is currently in the development stage of her next film, which is an autobiographical story.

A sister company is concerned with stage productions. It’s important to note that the two other features that Alivés has made are documentaries. La camarista is presented, in CinemaScope (2.35 : 1), almost like a documentary study of Eve’s working life in the hotel and the Press Notes reveal that the film started from a documentary approach. The whole film has a subdued colour palette of whites, blues and greys enlivened only occasionally by more dramatic colours. The hotel itself is ‘tastefully’ decorated. Significantly, perhaps, Eve is hoping to claim a bright red dress left behind by a guest. She is ‘top of the list’ if the owner doesn’t claim the dress after a few weeks have passed. I didn’t notice much music in the film, though as one reviewer has pointed out there is a sophisticated sound design by Guido Berenblum incorporating all the sounds of the building which is sealed off from the roar of the city outside. The film lasts for just over 100 minutes and the plot is minimal. We spend a significant amount of the running time accompanying Eve on her cleaning, bed-making and re-stocking of what the subtitles refer to as ‘amenities’ (soap, towels etc.). The film’s ‘action sequences’ comprise Eve’s interactions with other hotel staff and a handful of guests. Sometimes these meetings are quite dramatic, perhaps seeming more so because of the observational sequences which proceed them. When I reflected on the film’s aesthetic, the term that kept coming to me was ‘austere’, but perhaps it should have been ‘controlled’. There is enormous care in the presentation of what is a wonderful performance by Gabriela Cartol as Eve via the cinematography of Carlos Rossini, the editing of Omar Guzmán and the art direction by Vika Fleitas.

What are we invited to take from this meticulous observational study? Perhaps inevitably, critics have referenced Roma (2018) because of the parallel of Indigenous women working as maids/housekeepers in Mexico City. I’m not sure that is very helpful. In Roma, as in many other Latin American film narratives, the maid is part of a household with distinct relationships with a family and events are often played out as part of a family melodrama. Any Latin American film focusing on a maid is going to have a clear discourse about both social class and ethnicity in unequal societies – and not just in Latin America. La camarista is almost like an ‘anti-melodrama’ in its observational style, yet it does have its melodrama moments. Eve, once out of her uniform and with her hair down is an attractive young woman as well as a working mum. But just as importantly, the script develops a critique of the economic plight of the hotel workers in this hotel and symbol of global capitalism. There is a narrative tension in the film. Will Eve get her red dress and her promotion? Will she be able to improve her chances by gaining a high school diploma while studying in an improvised cramming class for hotel workers?

The hotel is a community, a form of family perhaps, for all the hotel workers. But it is also a factory in which workers are in danger of exploitation. Eve is understandably wary of getting closer to fellow workers and her immediate superiors. Managements invariably divide and rule. Eve will meet other workers who try to sell her things, pressurising her to buy. They may discriminate against her because of her background – yet she needs them and they may know more about the job and ways around problems.

I certainly recommend The Chambermaid, but audiences need patience and sharp observation to get everything from the narrative. Eve is definitely worth getting to know and I will look out for future films by Lila Avilés. I hope she doesn’t lose her documentarist’s eye, but I would like to see a little more narrative development in future projects. The film continues for a third week at HOME in Manchester, demonstrating how a 5 screen cinema can nurture an audience for films like this. The film is also available on Curzon’s streaming service in the UK and it is still touring venues in the US.