I had seen Sebastián Silva’s La nana (2009) many years ago. Considering to include it in my teaching curriculum next fall, I reviewed it a few weeks ago. Prior to the second encounter with the film, I remembered it as generally enjoyable, with solid, engaging actors, unobtrusive writing, and efficient montage. The film tells a story and communicates it effectively with a realist aesthetic, at times simulating the documentarian form with a hand-held camera. The direction privileges restrained acting, as well as the absence of non-diegetic sounds or melodic soundtrack. Despite its main story –the interaction between a upper-middle class family and the maid that has worked for them for twenty years–, La nana is far from being a melodrama. Some of the formal choices mentioned earlier, help to keep the melo away from the drama.
The second viewing was equally enjoyable, but I was quickly reminded of the problems populating the film. Why is the family portrayed so sympathetically, save some minor plot elements that show that it is not without its problems? Why is the protagonist’s transformation so conservative, as she continues to work for the family when the film concludes? Why not allow a complete break, full liberation for a character who clearly seems a subjugated being? This is where a socio-economic interpretive model of the film finds it to be lacking irreparably. The class divide between la nana and the bourgeoise family seems to be glossed over by general yet inconsequential interpersonal niceness. The beginning of the film shows this rather nicely, when the family is gathered at the table, and having finished the dinner that la nana has prepared and served, is getting ready to perform every year’s known surprise: shower her with presents to celebrate her birthday.
One could say that interpersonally there are no divisions between la nana and the family: la nana tells the kids how to behave, when to eat, what to do; she even prohibits the elder daughter and her friend from snacking late at night because she has already set up the table for the following morning’s breakfast. The girl’s mother, namely the lady of the house and the employer of la nana, quietly leaves the kitchen to avoid, one assumes, any confrontation with the maid. In the next scene the daughter recriminates the mother for her strange behavior to avoid any confrontation with the maid, even at her expense. “Are you out of your mind?” shouts the daughter.
If we continue with the socio-economic and socio-political interpretive model, we can criticize the film for preserving the social status quo pretty much intact, as no consequential change seems to befall either side of the socio-economic divide. Nothing changes dramatically in the residence where la nana works and lives. On the other hand, once could argue that this particular interpretive model allows us to see how the class divide, which may exist in arguably clear binary terms of struggle in the public sphere, becomes confused, obscured and distorted in the domestic space of the home. In the singular space where employer also plays the role of surrogate family, the relations of class and power become not only more layered and complex, but also perverse.
La nana portrays a universe where power struggle configured by class divide remains intact, rather than deactivated, played-out, or resolved, precisely because the divide remains masqueraded by pseudo-familial ties. If the film shows how the relations of power are less than neatly binary in numerous scenes in which la nana seems to exercise control over what transpires in the house, it is also suggested how the domestic space of the bourgeoise home does not so much stand opposite to the public sphere, as engulfs it. The private sphere of domestic relations is not simply the negation or opposition of the public sphere. Rather, it represents the simultaneous consummation of the latter and its repeated negation.
When I state that the relations of power in the private space of the home are complex, I do not intend to suggest that the figure of la nana holds more control that it would be generally attributed to someone of her social standing. My reading does not afford the character more social or political capacity than what she has, which is rather limited, as eloquently displayed by the uniform she wears. After all, it is clear that the maid’s employer makes every consequential decision for both the house and la nana. By complex I don’t mean that the power relations fail to be clearly demarcated, as, indeed, they are despite domestic interactions that may suggest the opposite or something different. The cinematic representation of such relations, however, becomes layered precisely because the private space and its domestic interactions, rather than public/political relations, stage complexity to obfuscate what is in fact the sustained reality: status quo.
Realism 