Review: The Chambermaid Confronts How the Self Is Diminished by Routine

It’s difficult to watch a cinematic depiction of a woman’s domestic toil and not think of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. Throughout Chantal Akerman’s magnum opus, we’re reminded, through terrifyingly slow directorial motions, of the repetitiveness of household tasks, the way female misery can masquerade as the inevitability of everyday life, and how a missing garment, or button, can unsettle an entire world.

In The Chambermaid, our heroine of domestic hell is Eve (Gabriela Cartol), though the living quarters she sterilizes aren’t hers, but those of guests staying at a luxury hotel in Mexico City. Director and co-writer Lila Avilés’s camera stays nearly still as this woman scours stains off of bathtubs, fetches pristinely white towels, tweezes out human hair from the crispest of bedsheets, or snoops through guests’ belongings, not out of malice but boredom. The camera’s stance is detached, but the drama whirring inside Eve is rather visceral, a discrepancy we grasp slowly as it becomes apparent that all this dreariness isn’t sustainable. The question becomes: When will Eve just lose it, and who will be the target of her pent-up rage?

A film structured around a worker’s tedious tasks is bound to work through motifs, and Avilés is unabashedly attentive to those that dot her screenplay: a red dress in the lost-and-found office that Eve keeps trying to call dibs on; Eve’s co-worker’s continual hawking of useless plastic food containers; a scaffolder who insists on watching Eve tidy up yet another room, his knocking on the window an unambiguous demand for some kind of striptease. But the ultimate motif, or guiding principle, in the film is Avilés’s refusal to, unlike Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, aestheticize her main character’s misery. The Chambermaid remains focused on the task at hand (Eve’s, namely), as if the filmmaker were more interested in unveiling the invisible violence of a system than in showing off her cinematographic skills.

Eve survives in an environment of simultaneously insidious and scandalous exploitation through automatism. She goes about her chores clinically, having developed a skin so thick that she’s become a façade. She pretends she doesn’t hear the sales pitch for the plastic containers for the umpteenth time, that a guest treating her like a vexing mosquito doesn’t wound her, and that another guest’s baby-sitting requests aren’t off-putting.

Avilés manages to convey a sense of evolution, or descent, in the midst of so much circularity. A layer of Eve’s thick skin gets chipped at each unfair request. We sense her die a little at every new iteration of mistreatment or errand so that by the time she actually breaks, we know that, in fact, the most significant repetition isn’t in the vacuuming, folding, or the scrubbing, but in the breaking itself. And if her eventual outburst, which may result in Eve’s deliverance or amount to a quickly aborted parenthetical pipe dream, seems so surprising to us, it’s because we, too, have been paying attention to something other than her human self.

In this sense, Eve’s story recalls the unhurried downfall of the perennially bored and horny unemployed woman, Laura, at the center of Michael Rowe’s Leap Year. Rowe’s film, too, is set in a Mexico City teeming with old dreams—of opportunity, of pleasure—metamorphosed into a rotten clockwork. Except that the final destination in Laura’s slow progress into her masochistic abyss can only be a hopeless one. Namely, death. The Chambermaid is more ambiguous about the conclusion of its character’s descension, reserving the possibility of flirtations with disaster to turn into acts of emancipation. Or, at the very least, a renewed, or more conscious, commitment to the nightmare of an existence devoid of dignity.