The Chambermaid (Lila Avilés, 2018)

Although The Chambermaid is a strong film on its own merits, I found myself mentally comparing it with Roma as I watched it. Both films focus on relatively young women in service professions, showing them hard at work cleaning up after people who are higher on the socioeconomic ladder than they are. But Roma was too often maddeningly opaque, offering us a largely external view of Cleo as the world swirled around her. By contrast, The Chambermaid uses our observation of its central character, Eva (Gabriela Cartol), to provide increasing insight into who she is, while allowing her to retain her interiority as well.

Eva works in a luxury hotel in Mexico City, keeping long hours while a babysitter stays with her son. We watch her go through the meticulous process of making beds, fluffing pillows, dusting lampshades, cleaning off the drapes, scouring the shower, and so on. But we also get to see her in her stolen, private moments between tasks. And Eva is an odd, quirky individual. At one point we see her collecting empty sugar packets from the garbage. Later, while snacking on some popcorn, she places two kernels in each of the packets and stands them up on the sink, like brightly colored soldiers or tiny sculptures.

Of course Eva has more conventional concerns as well. She is working to overcome her shyness while taking a GRE course for hotel employees (a service apparently secured by the housekeepers' union), engaging in a flirtation with a window washer, and trying to secure a red dress that has timed out of the lost and found. She strikes up a friendship with one of the GRE classmates, a maid named Miriam (Teresa Sánchez), who eventually becomes a professional rival. As we observe Eva, it becomes clear that much of her behavior can be subsumed under one primary conflict: the desire to advance within the ranks in her job, versus her depression at the thought of doing this long-term.

Avilés employs a rigorous, mostly fixed-frame style that situates Eva within oppressive, even claustrophobic compositions. This, together with Cartol's exquisitely retiring performance, almost work against the tendency to see Eva as an example of a social type or a position, "the working poor." The Chambermaid radically individualizes her, rarely letting us out of her purview. What we get is a portrait of skilled activity alternating with mental drift, embodiment short-circuited by a will to be somewhere far away.