Detailed movie reviews The Chambermaid

Eve (Gabriela Cartol) is a maid in a luxurious Mexico city hotel working on the 21st floor (but dreaming of the 42nd), sifting through guests’ possessions, phoning home to speak to her son and trying to better herself by reading her first book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Utliised by filmmakers as diverse as Stanley Kubrick, the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson, hotels offer myriad cinematic opportunities, be it creating both a metaphor and microcosm of society at large or exploring a hermetically sealed world where different rules apply. Debutante writer-director Lila Avilés seems to explore both angles with The Chambermaid, a low-key but confident Movies123 that shines a light on an invisible workforce with both compassion and simmering anger.

A portrait of a solitary woman who keeps everything under the surface.

Working with co-screenwriter Juan Carlos Marquéz, Avilés has adapted her own stage play, which itself was inspired by a 1980s photographic installation project, The Hotel, by artist Sophie Calle. As its genesis suggests, The Chambermaid isn’t heavy on plot incident. Instead, Avilés observes Eve (Cartol), a twentysomething chambermaid in an upscale Mexico City hotel, at work, detailing her day on the 21st floor with a scalpel-like precision as she meticulously cleans up the luxurious surroundings that she has no chance of ever enjoying. A recurring strand sees Eve being promised she will be promoted to the 42nd floor — a world of higher-class suites, with more pay and extra perks — and hankering for a lovely red dress left behind by a guest that she is entitled to claim. But even these small ambitions are denied her.

There are moments of interaction with guests — a female guest asks Eve to look after her baby while she jumps in the shower and it looks like it might develop into a friendship — but really this is a portrait of a solitary woman who keeps everything under the surface, finding tiny joys in rifling through the guests’ wastepaper baskets to get insight into their lives. Cartol is terrifically naturalistic as Eve, often the only person in the frame, etching hopes and aspirations but never soliciting sympathy.

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It shares thematic threads with Roma, but whereas Cuarón’s view of domestic drudgery is expansive and heroic, Avilés’ film is more intimate, creating an almost science-fiction environment in the hotel corridors and rooms, beautifully rendered in chilly, precise strokes and oppressive sound design. Without over-playing her hand, Avilés makes it clear Eve’s aspirations are sadly defined and diminished by the kind of moneyed guests she waits upon. The final moment, as she steps out into the real world with real people, has the same kind of punch as Andy Dufresne finding freedom from Shawshank.


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