Catalina Saavedra unleashes a star lead performance in this gripping Chilean thriller
Sebastián Silva's film is an unexpected combination: a gripping psychological thriller, and also a poignant human drama. It really is edge-of-the-seat stuff, with a startling denouement, and an outstanding central performance from Catalina Saavedra. She plays Raquel, the live-in uniformed maid, working for a well-to-do family in Santiago, Chile, in a handsome house with a pool, attending to the needs of the master and mistress along with their lively teenage children. She must also show respect to the children's very haughty and patrician grandmother, who comes to visit and does not hesitate to give her views on how the household should be run.
Raquel is treated as one of the family – that is, like a tiresome, but affectionately regarded cousin or poor relation – and the film opens with an uneasy and embarrassing birthday celebration that the children's...
Sebastián Silva's film is an unexpected combination: a gripping psychological thriller, and also a poignant human drama. It really is edge-of-the-seat stuff, with a startling denouement, and an outstanding central performance from Catalina Saavedra. She plays Raquel, the live-in uniformed maid, working for a well-to-do family in Santiago, Chile, in a handsome house with a pool, attending to the needs of the master and mistress along with their lively teenage children. She must also show respect to the children's very haughty and patrician grandmother, who comes to visit and does not hesitate to give her views on how the household should be run.
Raquel is treated as one of the family – that is, like a tiresome, but affectionately regarded cousin or poor relation – and the film opens with an uneasy and embarrassing birthday celebration that the children's...
- 8/26/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The City of God director is bringing his wit and energy to the capital for a talk as part of Festival Brazil
It is Festival Brazil in the UK this week, and as a part of it, the director Fernando Meirelles is coming to London next Tuesday evening to talk about his movies and Brazilian cinema in general – an event in which I am tangentially involved.
Meirelles is, of course the film-maker whose explosively powerful City of God – which effortlessly secured the bragging rights at the Cannes film festival when it premiered there in 2002 – did more than anything to trigger a new Latin American wave. It was the complex, interwoven account of gang-warfare in the Cidade De Deus favela in Rio de Janeiro: the story of children who manage to be both the ghetto's underclass and its criminal overlords. Its hyperactive energy was much admired and imitated, and three years later,...
It is Festival Brazil in the UK this week, and as a part of it, the director Fernando Meirelles is coming to London next Tuesday evening to talk about his movies and Brazilian cinema in general – an event in which I am tangentially involved.
Meirelles is, of course the film-maker whose explosively powerful City of God – which effortlessly secured the bragging rights at the Cannes film festival when it premiered there in 2002 – did more than anything to trigger a new Latin American wave. It was the complex, interwoven account of gang-warfare in the Cidade De Deus favela in Rio de Janeiro: the story of children who manage to be both the ghetto's underclass and its criminal overlords. Its hyperactive energy was much admired and imitated, and three years later,...
- 6/25/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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