FROM MEXICO

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Eve is a young employee of an expensive hotel in Mexico City. She works hard to provide for her little son, whom she doesn’t always get to see, returning home much later than his bedtime, saves her lunch money, and takes night school classes. Eve’s goal is to get transferred to a newly refurbished, more prestigious floor because that’s supposed to be the next step in the career ladder. Lost in the insular world of the hotel, she has a window cleaner flirt with her, befriends an older prankster Minitoy, and moonlights as a baby sitter for a guest, Romina. As Eve waits for change to come, the monotony of her labor slowly eats away at her consciousness.

WHO MADE IT: Lila Avilés, the director and writer, started as an actor. She has played in various film and TV projects, including the Mexican version of “Drunk History.” “The Chambermaid” is her directorial feature debut, and she co-wrote it with another beginner Juan Márquez. The actors in the film are all relatively unknown but provide some striking performances. Gabriela Cartol, in the role of Eve, is brooding, haunting, with eyes that stage their own drama: genius casting. Meanwhile Teresa Sánchez, who plays Minitoy, and Agustina Quinci, who plays Romina, are both very captivating. I have since seen Sánchez in “My Skin, Luminous,” and she has a fantastic screen presence that mixes bubbly familiarity with a malicious mystery: I hope she gets to be in more films.

WHY DO WE CARE: It’s crucial to see the different types of labor reflected on film, but the spotlight usually favors more visible workers of the service industry. We recently wrote about a film querying the lives of night cleaners, the semi-opaque backbone of our society. Much like them, the hotel maids, who maintain a liminal existence in the dusky corridors and the grey underbellies of hotels, luxurious and not, inhabit a world of identity and class complexities. “The Chambermaid” explores this world through Eve’s eyes, which allows the viewer to become one with her perspective. And this leads to one of the best and most compelling studies of “othering of labor” that I had seen on film. Eve’s repetitive, tedious work, and the lack of rewards it brings, are portrayed with a firm commitment, and the disassociation brought about by the drudgery translates to the viewer’s experience of the film. There is nothing dedicatedly surreal about the film, and yet its narrative starts to feel uncanny, creating an immersion of a menial labor existence. And when experienced, this immersion, while dizzying, becomes a stronger statement on the blue-collar plight than any indignant speech.