In "Live-in Maid," Norma Argentina sets her face in stone. Etched in a kind of permanent bereavement, it looks hard and doesn't move. Beauty masks and makeup arrive too late. But not too many minutes into this simply told, but emotionally robust movie, you get a vivid sense of how her face got that way. For 28 years, Argentina's character, Dora, has been cleaning the same Buenos Aires apartment. It belongs to Beba Pujols, a wealthy alcoholic who's played with contrasting floridness by Norma Aleandro. Beba is slipping so far down the socio-economic ladder, during Argentina's financial crisis in 2001, that she can no longer afford to pay her maid, and Aleandro relishes the drinking and stumbling and preening, the fabulousness of decline.
Looking beneath masks in 'Live-in Maid'
When we meet them, one is looking for a teapot, while the other is trying to hawk it at a pawn shop for extra cash. Dora hasn't been paid in months, but Beba still expects her to work for her. By the time we meet them, Dora is at her breaking point (the teapot's, too), and Beba already seems broken, despite her delusions. She gets a job selling beauty products around the city, exchanging them in one case for dinner at a cheap Chinese joint. Dora, meanwhile, needs to get paid. She and her boyfriend are modestly renovating their shack in the sticks (ceramic tiles on the concrete floor). So she tenders her resignation and moves out of Beba's, essentially enacting a divorce after so many years together.
The writer and director, Jorge Gaggero, could play this movie for absolute tragedy or total farce or even high melodrama. But he opts for a kind of dramatic minimalism. These two don't have much to say to each other. Neither woman has seemed to process or analyze the depth of their relationship, how it is some hopelessly tangled amalgam of business and friendship. (What if "Driving Miss Daisy" were such a study of the universes of awkward silences?)
The demands of both capitalism and the heart have bound these women to each other, and the mutual need seems to take them by surprise. That this is expressed with a minimum of dialogue attests to how good Aleandro and Argentina are in their totally opposite ways. The casting, in fact, is ingenious. Released in South America three years ago, this was Argentina's first part in a movie (she's almost 60), and her naturalism makes for a mesmerizing contrast with the superstar Aleandro's high style. You get the sense that the rich woman's narcissistic whirlwind has worn down the servant. But we learn that Dora's world is more complicated than just her employment. She has a shaky personal life, too.
In dribs and drabs, you get the sense that hard times are landing on everybody like anvils. We find out bits and pieces of the details of Dora and Beba's bond, and gradually we get a real sense of what these two have been through together and apart. Quite easily "Live-in Maid" could have descended into a kind of Joan Crawford-Bette Davis gorgon salute. But everyone here seems way too smart for that, though apparently the movie is being prepped for an English-language version. So beware.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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