Sydney Film Festival: Official Competition Continues

Chilean Sundance winner and Malkovich in Disgrace

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La nana

The well-trodden British genre of 'upstairs downstairs' films is reinvented in Sebastian Silva's Chilean drama, La Nana (The Maid). Drawing from his own experience raised in a household with live-in maids, Silva brings both an inquisitive and empathetic eye to this ignored domestic sphere.

La Nana follows the institutionalised life of Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), a live-in maid who has been serving the family for 23 years. The film begins on her 41st birthday, and with a delightfully awkward scene that clearly establishes her place as an intrinsic part of the family, though ultimately and irrevocably an outsider. When Pilar (Claudia Celedon) decides Raquel needs help and brings in a new maid, the stressed-out and headache prone Raquel begins to unspool.

After a series of humorous if borderline creepy run-ins with two of the new maids, Raquel eventually meets her match with Lucy (Mariana Loyola). Unable to scare her away like the others, Raquel eventually opens up to Lucy's infectious enthusiasm and light-hearted approach to life.

It's easy to see why this film won at Sundance. Saavedra totally embodies the role of Raquel, holed up in her disinfected cage, while Sergio Armstrong's handheld cinematography underscores the claustrophobia of her existence. Silva and co-writer Pedro Peirano's screenplay comes across as personal and insightful without being indulgent. Indeed Silva saw the film as an opportunity to, "exorcise [the] unsolved emotional relationship with [my] maid." To that end, he specifically asked Armstrong to, "shoot as if the camera was a curious boy" while his story reflects his own understanding of Raquel: from wary distance to warm-hearted empathy.

This world of live-in maids seems particularly foreign to Australian audiences. Indeed the festival crowd seemed so caught up in 'the maid phenomenon' -- as Silva refers to it -- that in he had to gently remind us that it's not really what the film is about. Despite La Nana's uplifting ending, the film is ultimately a rather poignant portrait of woman breaking out her state of protracted childhood by learning how to love.

Disgrace

Scratch the surface of the 'new' South Africa and you'll find a painful patchwork of old wounds. Steve Jacobs' adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace fearlessly pares back the layers of post-Apartheid South Africa within the microcosm of a father/daughter relationship.

David Lurie (John Malkovich) is a jaded university English professor, cast into disrepute after an aggressive affair with one of his students. His stunning lack of remorse is matched only by glimpses of self-loathing. "A thing. Not possible to love and condemned to solitude," he pointedly describes in one lecture. Seemingly content to crucify his career, David leaves Cape Town to visit his daughter in the rural regions of Eastern Cape. Immediately concerned about Lucy's (Jessica Haines) vulnerability living on the farm alone, his fears are soon realised when the pair are brutally attacked and the farm ransacked.

This film is not easy going. Jacobs and his cast unflinchingly bring the harsh realities of Coetzee's story to life. Malkovich -- who always tends to play Malkovich -- here softens his trademark clipped diction with a South African accent and embodies David with a wretched and compelling conviction. Haines, in her feature debut, holds her ground with Malkovich. She portrays Lucy with a steely resolve: the devastating inheritance stemming from her father's dogged narcissism.

While both actors shoulder the weighty subject matter, cinematographer Steve Arnold both underscores and contrasts the tone of the film with stark, beautiful images. The craggy mountains that surround Lucy's farm are an omnipresent reminder of how penned in she's allowed herself to become. The landscape is at times lush and bountiful, and at others barren and hostile. Arnold captures it all with a skilful and cinematic eye.

Jacobs' wife, writer-producer Anna-Maria Monticelli, had the intimidating task of adapting Coetzee's work, and the source material is evident at times in the episodic nature of some scenes. But where she, and the entire production team do succeed, is in translating the density and sophistication of the work, particularly in the thematic comparisons between human and animal.

Celebrated academic Benedict Anderson described a nation as "an imagined community", existing only as a shared idea in the minds of its inhabitants. For a population still reeling from a tumultuous and devastating history, a united South Africa must seem at times impossible to imagine. "It's finished now," Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), the black co-owner of Lucy's farm repeats to David. But acceptance does not come so easily for those mired in disgrace.

For full program details, head over to the Sydney Film Festival's website