(courtesy IMDb)
This may be news to the producers of many a Hollywood blockbuster – this reviewer loves many of them but subtle they are not – but there is real power in telling an emotionally impactful story quietly.
While the temptation, especially in our cliffhanger-addicted, streaming algorithm modern digital age is to ramp up the intensity and the noise and the dramatic twist, there’s something truly impactful about simply letting events play out in almost real time without frenetic hyperbole muddying the narrative waters.
How true that is is evidenced in A Quiet Maid (Calladita) – the Spanish title literally translates as “quiet” – where we meet and get to know a Colombian maid called Ana (Paula Grimaldo) who is working for an upper class family who are indolently spending the hot August months at their holiday home on the Costa Brava on Spain’s north-east coast.
Ana is adept, even after just three months in the job at keeping a low profile and getting her work done, with “Mmhmm” her standard response to just about everything, especially when she is imperiously instructed in what to do and how to do by her employers, Andrea (Ariadna Gil) and Pedro (Luis Bermejo).
She knows she just needs to keep her head down, the driving priority for her being to keep the money, low though it may be, rolling in so she can fund her younger sister’s medical studies back in Colombia.
At first, everything seems warm and convivial and though she is expected to wait on Pedro and Andrea, and their grown children, Jacobo (Pol Hermoso) and Claudia (Violeta Rodríguez), hand and foot, they are polite and they seem genuinely appreciative of all the work she does.
And just as well, because her workload is considerable.
She cooks, she cleans, she helps get ready for major functions – Andrea is an art dealer and loves to hold court at events with artists and moneyed buyers – and she is expected not to take a single day off, the promise being that all her rostered days off will be made up to her in September when the family heads home.
It’s a very loose compact though and Ana has no choice, since she has no papers, to take her employers at their word and to hope that she will get the promised leave and also immigration work done on her behalf.
Trust is the order of the day here but it quicks emerges, in a film that has a lot of subtext and implication in its nuanced, measured storytelling, which all happens on a timescale that reflects the languidity of a summer holiday, that the trust really only operates one way and that the family, will on a whim, remove their approval, their socialability and their good behaviour on a whim.
As A Quiet Maid (Calladita) progresses, and a series of small but seismically important events take place, it emerges that Ana bears all the responsibility and all the concern, but that she has no power or real agency, and as a fairly traumatic scene at the end makes clear, one of the few that actually interrupts the otherwise languid narrative pace, very little recourse if the family ever changes their mind about her.
Ana thankfully is well and truly able to stand up for herself, and she does, as much as the power imbalance between rich employer and lowly-paid maid allows, and yet while there are some small acts of rebellion, one of which causes her some long-term damage which she really doesn’t recover from, Ana very much stays within her lane until events means she has no choice but to step out it.
Where A Quiet Maid (Calladita) excels is in slowly but crucially building up a series of the aforementioned small moments into something much bigger and impactful, but in a way that suggests a slow burning walk to something that might deleteriously impact Ana’s job and that of her precarious position in Spain.
These small but pivotal moments are interspersed with Ana’s low key attempts to carve out some time for herself, whether it’s escaping to the beach without permission with her fellow maid and new friend, fellow Colombian Gisela (Nany Tovar) or feeding the feral cats which multiply in number to almost cuddly plague proportions, a satirical jab at Pedro’s almost maniacal obsession with the local feline population wrecking his vegetable garden.
The presence of the cats and other trivial obsessions of the employing family highlight quietly but with hugely amusing impact, how obsessed these rich people are with issues that have no real impact on the very real material business of living.
Ana lives with that reality every single day, and she can’t afford to get distracted by trivialities when the burdensome stuff of real life such as remitting money home never really go away, but Andrea and Pedro and their kids – only Violeta is consistently and genuinely nice to Ana but strangely, its her trust that the maid abuses at one point – inured to such realities, end up spending their days on trivial things and the kind of escapist indolence that Ana will likely never now.
As a satire of the stark differences between the classes, and how this shapes their behaviour in some profound ways, A Quiet Maid (Calladita) is superb, skewering all kinds of assumptions and ridiculously the societal myopia of the rich who would know a real life issue if it rose up and bit them.
That it does so quietly and without “Look at me! Loom at me!” fanfare is nothing short of remarkable, a masterfully realised example courtesy of writer-director Michael Faus that less can be more when it comes to storytelling and that while the temptation is there to turn up the melodramatic tension and comically exaggerate for temporary effect, many stories, such as that of A Quiet Maid (Calladita) benefit enormously from playing it softly, softly and letting the objects of their quite ridicule damn themselves by their own myopic, self-serving concerns which ultimately will rise up to bite them on the proverbial.