Regina Case plays Val, a live-in housekeeper who cares for Michel Joelsas’s Fabinho, the only child in an affluent Sao Paulo family.
In 2012, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho took a page from Michael Haneke's bourgeois-baiting playbook with Neighboring Sounds, a masterfully moody interrogation of his homeland's colonial legacy and enduring class hierarchy. The picture won praise from critics as well as Brazil's nomination for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but was little-seen outside of the festival circuit.
Among those who did see it, however, was Filho's compatriot and fellow filmmaker Anna Muylaert. In the course of promoting her fourth feature, The Second Mother, the Paulistana writer-director has routinely singled out Neighboring Sounds as a primary source of inspiration.
Like Filho's film, Muylaert's is attuned to matters of social stratification and economic mobility, and the manner in which Brazil's leisure class is propped up by the undervalued exertions of domestic labourers. But, in contrast to the disquieting Neighboring Sounds – and to most socially minded art-house imports – The Second Mother is warm and hopeful.
Feted at Berlin, Muylaert's film is an effervescent comic drama that delights in the disruption of traditional upstairs/downstairs dynamics. At its heart is a pair of excellent, Sundance award-winning performances by Brazilian screen veteran Regina Case and newcomer Camila Mardila.
Case plays Val, who left her provincial hometown to become a devoted live-in housekeeper to an affluent Sao Paulo family. For 13 years, Val has cooked, cleaned and acted as the primary caregiver to Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), the household's only child. As a consequence, it's been nearly as long since she last saw her own daughter, Jessica (Mardila), whom she has supported but seldom visited.
Apart from her guilt at having surrendered Jessica to relatives and despite the modesty of the servant's quarters she occupies, Val's life is, initially, a contended one: She has a surrogate son to coddle, a handsome home to upkeep and harbours no ambitions above her station.
Not so, the headstrong Jessica, who surprises her mother with an announcement that she has registered to sit her university entrance exams in Sao Paulo. Val receives permission for Jessica to share her room, but is aghast when her daughter readily accepts her hosts' pretenses of greater hospitality, unaware of, or perhaps simply unwilling to conform to, the unspoken custom that dictates she politely decline.
Over her mother's despairing protestations and to the passive-aggressive chagrin of the mistress of the house (Karine Teles), Jessica is soon installed in the well-appointed guest room, is dining at the family table and even bathing in the backyard pool.
This latter transgression is likely a nod to another of Muylaert's professed points of reference, Argentine drama La Cienaga by Lucrecia Martel. Martel memorably employed a murky swimming pool as a metaphor for bourgeois malaise, encircling it with a privileged but dysfunctional family of listless, dissolute lushes.
For her part, Muylaert is more charitable to her well-to-do subjects, in part because they aren't her focus. While their sense of entitlement is obvious, The Second Mother is mostly concerned with the relationship between Val and Jessica, and how exposure to her daughter's forthright expectation of equality and eager efforts to better herself gradually help the former to recognize, and potentially escape, her own marginalization.
Next to Filho's and Martel's films, Muylaert's relatively optimistic take on Latin American class politics is more accessible in every regard. And while it may not court the same kind of cinephilic adulation as those darker, more formally daring works, it's poised to nurture a broad and appreciative audience, both in Brazil and beyond.