The Hotel, Room 47: an open suitcase; mussed bedsheets; a torn postcard of Venetian sights, its eight pieces carefully re-assembled. For her text and photographic series ‘The Hotel’ (1981-83), artist Sophie Calle worked as a chambermaid for three weeks in Venice. There she observed and recorded the embodied traces of each room’s transitory visitors, creating 21 diptychs comprised of a grid of black and white photographs, and a single photograph of the hotel bed paired with descriptive, diaristic text. Calle actively intervened within these spaces, searching the belongings of the (absent) hotel guests to recover intimate details. In ‘The Hotel, Room 47’, Calle describes going through a suitcase only to find plastic bags filled with different types of medication. We learn of her boredom, and later, how she retrieved the torn postcard from the wastepaper basket, scrutinising its private message. As liminal places that make our distinctions between private and public space un-steady, hotels have long been a source of fascination for filmmakers. Like Calle’s The Hotel, films such as Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts (1989) and Jessica Hausner’s Hotel (2004) explore interactions between transient guests and hotel staff, laying bare the unique temporality of these spaces, where each day the traces of previous guests are wiped clean.
In her 2015 book Hotel, part of Bloomsbury’s series of ‘Object Lessons’, Joanna Walsh speaks of the desires wrought by this daily practice of erasure: “Was it the gleaming tiled bathrooms I hadn’t cleaned, was it the beds I hadn’t made, that magically remade themselves every time I left the room, my own presence constantly smoothed over?”i For Walsh, this desire is not only one of erasure and remaking; it is intimately connected with the question of “home work” that runs through Hotel, the quotidian domestic labour usually performed by women.ii This gendered labour, Walsh reminds us, finds another expression in the figure of the chambermaid.iii While Calle focuses on creating a speculative intimacy with the guests, Mexican theatre and film director Lila Avilés recovers from The Hotel this activity of labour. Inspired by Calle’s work and the occluded labour of the chambermaid, Avilés developed a play, La Camarera (2013-2014), that later formed the basis of her debut feature film, The Chambermaid (2018).
The Chambermaid, which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, follows the experience of Eve (Gabriela Cartol), a 24-year-old chambermaid at a modern luxury hotel in Mexico City. Its understated narrative pivots on Eve’s desire for a promotion to the hotel’s newly re-opened 42nd floor, and traces the consequences of her encounter and subsequent friendship with Minitoy (Teresa Sanchez), a fellow chambermaid she meets at the hotel’s staff education programme. The film unfolds almost exclusively within the confines of the hotel, with the city only glimpsed through its expansive windows – a distant skyline. Inside, the camera tracks Eve closely, and rarely pulls back to reveal the full scale of her surroundings. The film cuts between a handful of compressed and often sequestered spaces: the service lift to the amenities closet, narrow corridors to private guest rooms. This circumscribed setting, magnified by the camera’s proximity, accentuates Eve’s restricted field of agency. Without images of her commute or home life to mark the passage of time, each working day melds seamlessly into the next, punctuated by brief exchanges with hotel staff and guests, repeated queries at the ‘Lost and Found’ for a red dress, and daily phone calls to her four-year old son at home. As Eve meticulously cleans hotel rooms, the camera closes in on each gesture. In a frontal shot, we watch Eve smooth out a pillow with an almost mathematical precision. Here, and throughout the film, both dialogue and music are sparse: the subtly-textured sound design instead foregrounds these gestures of labour, amplifying the sweep of her skin against the thick feather pillow.
Despite this attention to material detail, The Chambermaid’s presentation of domestic labour diverges from the realist tradition of films like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Wang Bing’s 15 Hours (2017), or the tenets of Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s recent project, Labour in a Single Shot (2011–). While Jeanne Dielman uses extended duration to render its protagonist’s labour visible (and audible), The Chambermaid eschews this durational aesthetic. This is not a film of static long takes. Rather, through her use of editing, Avilés challenges the view that a commitment to observation equals or requires a privileging of this particular format. Duration is not the only route to film’s revelatory or demonstrative power. In The Chambermaid, it is used sparingly, such as when an Orthodox Jewish guest observing Shabbat outsources his labour, requesting that Eve push the lift button for him. The camera then stays with the pair for the entire upward journey. But more generally, swift cuts that interrupt the on-screen action emphasise the accretion of (unmarked) time. Gestures of labour and minor events repeat and begin to accumulate, and the contours of each particular action become increasingly indeterminate. If in Jeanne Dielman, as Ivone Margulies suggests, the contrast between minor event and extended duration creates a sense that “nothing happens”,iv editing in The Chambermaid creates a sense that ‘nothing changes’. Time passes and Eve’s labour becomes palpable in the weight of its accumulation.
Avilés’s research into the lived experiences of hotel chambermaids contributes to the film’s observational mode. This was carried out at the Intercontinental Presidente Mexico City, where The Chambermaid was then filmed over a span of 17 days, incorporating many hotel staff as nonprofessional actors. This meeting of reality and fiction is no surprise given that Avilés’s previous films are documentaries on social issues, from the ecological perspective of La Fertilidad de la Tierra (2016), to the realities of migration and violence in Avilés’s portrait of her aunt, Nena (2017). In The Chambermaid, Avilés explores not only the labour of the chambermaids, but also the distance between their world and that of the hotel guests. In one scene, Eve receives an order to refill a VIP guest’s bathroom amenities. The camera cuts to Eve entering his room: splayed out on the bed, he directs her towards the bathroom, while his eyes remain fixed on the TV. Over the din of English-language news, we watch Eve stacking bottle after bottle along the guest’s bathroom countertop, now spilling over with his collection of unused – and unneeded – luxury soaps and shampoos. The most striking exploration of distance occurs in the scenes with another hotel guest, an Argentinian mother (Agustina Quinci). Following Eve’s intimate phone call to her own son at home, the film cuts to Eve in the mother’s room, who has requested a chambermaid to tend to her baby as she showers. The camera fixes on Eve in close-up, listening as the guest speaks at her from the shower. This largely one-sided dialogue, and the frequent depiction of the Argentinian mother as a voice off-frame, continues in later scenes, and underscores the distance between them. “I would love to go back to work,” the mother confides, dissatisfied with the prospect of staying at home all day with her baby. Eve remains quiet. This is, as the preceding phone call reminds us, a luxury she is not afforded.
Although Eve’s silences across the film mean that she is granted little psychological exposition, this is not to say she remains opaque. The camera’s proximity to her attunes us to her facial expressiveness and wordless gestures, opening up a space for us to access, however incompletely, her interior life. As Eve confronts the hotel’s formal as well as informal rules and economies, The Chambermaid gives weight to small, intimate moments of transgression: staring out the window; pocketing objects from a guest room bin; undressing in front of the window-cleaner; accidentally bleeding through her uniform and getting menstrual blood onto the clinical-white sheets. “The sheets are always the colour of erasure,” Joanna Walsh writes.v Like Eve, the narrator of Hotel bleeds onto them, rinsing the sheets clean: “I had a duty to the hotel, a duty not to be too human.”vi Avilés refuses to present us with an upward trajectory, to allow Eve to break from the hermetic, albeit multiple, worlds of the hotel. In doing so, The Chambermaid exposes not only the often-occluded labour of the hotel chambermaid, but also the restricted field of agency and the precarious alignments these conditions of labour can produce.
i Joanna Walsh, Hotel (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 13. ii Ibid., 45. iii Erik Morse, “Travel Souvenirs: An Interview with Joanna Walsh,” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/22/travel-souvenirs-an-interview-with-joanna-walsh/, 22 September 2015. iv Ivone Marguiles, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1966), 21. v Walsh, Hotel, 84. vi Ibid., 62.
Hannah Paveck is a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral project draws on the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy to examine sound and listening in contemporary global art cinema.
