Maid(s) in Manhattan
In honor of Women’s History Month, let’s pay tribute to invisible labor which, so often, is female. This March is a month of Maids — check out these two new films about mighty unsung hero(ine)s of the (wo)menial! They keep things tidy even when their lives are messy…
Léonor Serraille
MOTHER AND SON (UN PETIT FRÈRE)
2022, France, 117 min., in French with English subtitles
(Part of “Rendezvous with French Cinema” Festival)
Walter Reade Theater, March 6 and 8
A “portrait of the complex, sometimes painful relationship between an African immigrant mother and her sons. Upon arriving in France from the Ivory Coast in 1989 with two young children, Rose finds work as a hotel cleaner. […] Spanning 20 years of their ever-shifting relationship, Serraille demonstrates rare nuance and sensitivity in this thoughtful portrait of an Afro-French family.” (Film at Lincoln Center)
Lucrecia Martel
2022, Argentina/Mexico, 12 min., in Spanish with English subtitles
Museum of the Moving Image, March 19
(Part of “First Look Festival”)
New York premiere
The latest work from the masterful Martel is “an exquisitely ambiguous class encounter palindrome in which a woman’s training in hospitality keeps getting derailed by calls from home and other impulses.” (Museum of the Moving Image)
Martel’s short film precedes the New York premiere of TORI AND LOKITA by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne.
Honorable mention to these “old” maids also screening this month — despite operating according to traditional fantasies and fears about class, sexuality and female power, these are two classics well worth catching.
Kim Ki-Young
Metrograph, March 14, 15 and 16
1960, 108 min., DCP, in Korean with English subtitles
A composer hires a young woman to help with the chores after his pregnant wife becomes too tired to keep house. The new maid wreaks havoc on their middle-class existence, upending their domestic lives in a maelstrom of lust, obsession and revenge. This melodrama-morality tale-horror film is widely regarded as one of South Korean cinema’s greatest.
Luis Bunuel
1964, France, 97 min., DCP, in French and Italian with English subtitles
A beautiful self-assured Parisian woman joins a provincial estate as a domestic, using her beauty and wiles to navigate the perversities and violence she encounters in its residents.