What happens when you tell an autobiography through the eyes of someone who is, patently, not you? And, in this case, what if that someone was paid to raise you, feed you, and clean your house? […] But the hard fact remains that many people live outside the aphoristic remit of the personal as political. For all the doomsday clamour and demands that art attend social problems with an urgency that matches their arrival, fictional characters have no obligation to be avatars of praxis.[…]
The film is stitched together with glacial long takes that don’t wink so much as nod self-appraisingly to the neorealist tradition of magnifying the banal. However easy it is to dismiss a static or slow camera as performing attentiveness, it works – I have never looked so hard at soapsuds, or dog shit swept off tiles, or burnt grass, ghostly in the aftermath of a forest fire.
— Phoebe Chen (Another Gaze)
In 1970s Mexico City, two domestic workers help a mother of four while her husband is away for an extended period of time.