In a memorable still from the film Roma , Cleo, the central character, is framed looking out of a car window, her arm tenderly holding a pair of dozing children in her charge. At that moment, when her mind seems adrift, her eyes soft, she could be anyone. But she isn’t anyone — she is a live-in maid whose story is centrestage in the widely acclaimed Roma .
When Yalitza Aparicio, who plays Cleo in the film, heard she was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Actress category, she reacted, saying: “As a daughter of a domestic worker and an indigenous woman myself, I am proud this movie will help those of us who feel invisible be seen.”
The character of the domestic help, usually relegated to the margins both on and off screen, has on occasion surfaced to serve a larger dramatic purpose. It has been used to draw our attention to class prejudice, social justice or family dynamics. We have been treated to intricate upstairs-downstairs drama of the likes of Downton Abbey , and watched the idea cloaked in fantasy as the nanny story of Mary Poppins .
Between romcoms and melodrama, in India and in Hollywood, the ‘help’ has served several plotlines. Of late, a string of filmmakers has gone beyond the gloss to bring to screen stories that come from a personal space and speak of uncomfortable truths about how deeply class divisions inform our everyday life, and the little cruelties and ironies that we don’t think enough about.
Roma, to me, was most significant for the subtle, often contradictory relationship between the two women — Cleo and her employer, Sofia, played by Marina de Tavira. Cleo, in many ways, is her closest ally — and also, unthinkingly, her punching bag.
Swara Bhaskar plays a member of the housekeeping staff at a hotel in Anusha Bose’s short film ‘Shame’ (January 2019).
As Mexican as the texture and context of the movie is, the story is universal — it’s about the tedious and often thankless job of domestic work and the lives beyond our privileged eyes.
This, at first glance, is what the recent short film Shame , directed by Anusha Bose and starring Swara Bhaskar, seems to say. Bhaskar, playing a member of the housekeeping staff at a hotel, takes us through the efficient way in which these workers bring back spotless order to dishevelled rooms — but she then gives us something more.
When she happens to see through an unlocked door a pair of guests getting cosy, her reticence, as neatly pressed as her uniform, comes undone — and that’s unacceptable to her employers.
Shame snowballs into a patchy, incredulous revenge drama but it is, all the same, noteworthy for some of the questions it raises. Can we acknowledge those who work for us and do menial jobs as people with similar desires as us? Can we forgive them their transgressions as equals, without indulging in power play?
In Sir , which is doing the festival circuit and awaiting release in India, director Rohena Gera goes many steps forward to offer another equation altogether. Her two protagonists — Ratna (Tillotama Shome) and Ashwin (Vivek Gomber) — come from disparate backgrounds and are housed under the same roof. She, the maid, he, the ‘sir’, locked in what the director calls “an impossible love story”.
Ratna (Tillotama Shome) and Ashwin (Vivek Gomber) come from disparate backgrounds and are housed under the same roof in Rohena Gera’s ‘Sir’.
In an interview to La Semaine de la Critique at Cannes last year, Shome said that reading the script made her feel very uncomfortable “because I am guilty of having the same prejudices that the film is trying to expose. Prejudices that are archaic, prejudices that are redundant, prejudices that really shouldn’t exist but they do. They exist within me.”
Gera chose to make the movie on this subject because the class issue is something she has struggled with her whole life, having grown up with live-in help, she said in an interview. “But we live with this sort of racism and segregation within the house and it’s complicated as a child, because you love this person and she takes care of you but you learn very young that there are barriers…,” she said. In Sir , Gera explores how we choose who to love, how we allow ourselves to love who we love.
What these films do well is to set up the deep interdependence between the ones who are served and the ones who serve — and the terribly fragile existence of the latter. As Cleo in Roma goes about her daily tasks — washing away dog poop from the driveway, cleaning the house, taking care of the children — she also has to handle personal tragedies, with no space or time to mourn, because she can’t afford to lose her job.
Filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, who based the film on his own childhood and his nanny, said in an interview to The Guardian : “…It has made me reassess many things, including my own complicity in certain situations — such as hierarchical society and the relationship between class and race that is prevalent not only in my country, but throughout the world.” He spent almost a year looking for the right person to play Cleo.
Bhumi Pednekar as Sudha in Zoya Akhtar’s short in the anthology Lust Stories (2018).
These are roles that demand a display of quiet strength, the ability to tuck away your own problems to focus on the problems of the more privileged. Bhumi Pednekar played Sudha in Zoya Akhtar’s short that was part of the anthology Lust Stories , and did an excellent job. Sudha takes humiliation on her chin, stoically serving tea to the employer with whom she shared a passionate relationship till only a few days ago and who is now getting ready to marry someone else.
As one of the most vivid portrayals of the casual cruelties of class prejudice, Alice in Mira Nair’s memorable Monsoon Wedding comes to mind. Played with sensitivity by Shome, Alice looks up in horror when a harmless flight of fantasy — trying on her employer’s jewellery while dusting a room — ends in her being branded a thief, snatching away not just a private moment but also the right to benefit of doubt.
Cinema has the power to make the invisible visible, and these sensitive moments remind us of our complicity, the powers we use and misuse, and how blind we can be to those who are intimately in our lives.
The freelance journalist is a lover of cakes, chai, bookshops and good yarns.
