Navigating the divide between the rich and the poor

Regina Casé and Camila Márdila in "The Second Mother." Image courtesy Oscillloscope Films.

My brother and I were technically latchkey children in the earlier days of our childhood. We were often left to our own devices in our house surrounded by the woods as our mom worked into the evening and beyond. It wasn't a dire situation, but money was tight after the divorce and she needed the work to create that oft-spoken about better life that actually comes to fruition every then and now (and it very much did for her). I know why she put in the hours she did back then, but I'll never truly understand much she lost to earn a decent living and enough money to stock the cabinets with Ramen noodles.

It has become my comfort food.

What I have learned though is parenthood is a form of sacrifice, especially for a single parent trying to raise a child to the best of his or her abilities. It was the case for my mom, and it is the case for the titular mother (played by Regina Casé) in “The Second Mother,” a very-well acted film whose cheery exterior masks the damage caused by the little tragedies in life.

Casé's character, Val, is a housemaid for a wealthy São Paulo family headed by a hippy doctor (Lourenço Mutarelli) but lorded over by fashion guru Bárbara (Karine Teles). She's served the family for 10 years, effectively raising the couple’s son Fabinho (Michel Joelsas) and smothering the boy with kisses, kind words and general adoration. But things change when Casé's daughter, Jéssica (Camila Márdila) moves in temporarily as she prepares for a college-entrance exam at a local university. Márdila, who has rarely seen her mother over the last decade, doesn't understand the sizable gap in status between Casé and the family she serves, which effectively upturns the proverbial apple cart and results in a few awkward moments and a possible sea change in the traditional household.

On the surface there isn't all that much new ground tread with “The Second Mother” – Jean Renoir's “The Rules of the Game” covered the servant/employer relationship brilliantly way back in 1939 – and even the film doesn’t go for subtlety when depicting the inherent inequality in social strata between Casé and her employers. Yet the movie executes its points with precision, hitting the key notes about the unfairness of the current class systems – and how it transcends generations – hard enough to get the point across but not so hard to cause a headache.

That is the overt theme behind “The Second Mother,” although the deeper point writer/director Anna Muylaert seems to make involves the last word in the translated title: motherhood. This film is about the definition of that word, whether a mother is a person who births a child or the person who raises that child through the years. The argument becomes something of a slippery slope; Casé works so hard to make enough to care for her daughter that she effectively trades her for the opportunity to raise someone else's child. What about Teles’ Bárbara, a woman who works hard but rules her roost with a frozen fist and understands little about her own son? Muylaert makes it clear Teles isn't working to support the family – the money was inherited by Mutarelli from his father – so her eagerness to step away from her role as a mother is seen easily as a form of emotional abandonment, especially with how cruelly she acts through the course of the film. 

Sort of like her, just without the request to cut someone's heart out.

Except that would be too easy, and Muylaert is much too smart to keep things that simple. She has Teles overreact to a few minor (and ultimately asinine) social faux pas not just because of the violation of the unwritten rule, but out of a sense of jealousy toward Casé's relationship with Joelsas’ Fabhino and the realization that she couldn't give up enough to make her son love her as he does the family servant.

There's just so much pain in “The Second Mother,” so much hurt from all of the central characters, including the wicked Teles. All of that hurt, though, is buried underneath the societal rules and the ersatz sense of satisfaction expressed by family members who are more eager to text during supper than communicate. Casé is dragged into that sea of remorse, hiding the loneliness she feels through her affection toward Joelsas. It takes an outsider – in this case a woman not raised by the rules of order – to break through the home's everlasting grief for lost potential. Motherhood may be a sacrifice, but Casé learns it's not necessarily a zero-sum game.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 112 minutes

Genre: Drama 
 

Ask Away

Target audience: People who are hardcore nerds for foreign cinema, along with Brazilians.

Take the whole family?: There is no reason why this film deserves an “R” rating, so it's more than cool for mid-teens and above.

Theater or Netflix?: You might have to wait to see it at home, although it is worth an afternoon matinee if you can find it.

Is it OK to be a working mother?: In the film's universe, the answer is a little murky. “The Second Mother” certainly respects Casé's Val for what she's trying to do, but it chastises her a bit for missing out on much of her daughter's life. It’s certainly worth a good argument, which is one reason why this would be a great film for a women’s studies class.

Watch this as well?: To stick with the foreign vibe, take a look at two older films from Spanish director Pedro Almodovar that deal with the perils of motherhood: “Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Volver.” Both have a relatively light tone, but for something that will knock your soul down a skosh, try “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”

 

One of those films in which everything happens when nothing is happening.