Sprzątaczka

Every now and then, a film or series manages to hit me right in the sensitive nerve endings because I don't expect it and I don't have time to prepare my defenses. Here we had a fantastic script paired with excellent direction and a stellar cast - casting Andie MacDowell and Margaret Qualley as mother and daughter was a stroke of genius that elevated the whole thing by a star. It's not often that almost every episode of a series manages to pump such a dose of hopeless despair into me, but they really nailed it here. This is the second Netflix production in a short while where I don't have to complain about annoying quotas, political correctness, or an excess of melodrama. I'm just debating its genre. Drama? Comedy? Well, I don't know, it brought on more depression than reading Zola's 'The Kill.' Despite Alex's missteps, I found myself rooting for her character persistently, which means the creators managed to pull me into the story. A great piece of work that wasn't an easy watch. / Lesson learned: If you are sensitive or have a tendency toward depression, maybe go for something lighter. (18.04.2022)

Maid is something between a maternal (melo)drama, a thriller and a socio-economic study. In the first episode, a young mother and her daughter flee an abusive partner. She has no money, no job, no roof over her head and no one to help her (on the contrary, her manic-depressive mother, who refuses therapy and medication, only adds to her worries). The following nine episodes quite realistically depict the challenges that a person in her situation has to deal with (the series was based on the memoirs of Stephanie Land, who struggled with poverty and emotional abuse for several years). How to get custody and a government subsidy for preschool and housing? How to escape an aggressive ex and cope with PTSD? How to organise a children’s birthday party with nothing but food stamps? How not to go insane? Though it’s not easy to watch and you will cry often, Maid is not overwrought misery porn. Alex, played by the great Margaret Qualley (of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fame), has plenty of joyful and humorous moments – mainly with her daughter – and she is not, in terms of character, a flawless victim of domestic violence and an indifferent system that offers nothing but injustice (similarly, her former partner is not a one-dimensional villain). At times, the series slides into slight didacticism, but due to the importance of the topic (and its invisibility to a large part of society) I didn’t mind the effort to describe as vividly as possible the struggles of single mothers and to show possible ways out. Maid is a major surprise and one of the most successful mainstream attempts to approximate Ken Loach. (12.10.2021)