The Second Mother reflects the social issues of unspoken class

By GTVW Staff

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The Second Mother, a film by Brazilian director Anna Muylaert, starring the great Regina Casé, one of the South American country’s finest actors. The Second Mother centers around Val (played by Casé), a hard-working live-in housekeeper in modern day Sao Paulo. Val is perfectly content to take care of every one of her wealthy employers’ needs, from cooking and cleaning to being a surrogate mother to their teenage son, who she has raised since he was a toddler. But when Val’s estranged daughter Jessica (Camila Márdila) suddenly shows up the unspoken but intrinsic class barriers that exist within the home are thrown into disarray. Jessica is smart, confident, and ambitious, and refuses to accept the upstairs/downstairs dynamic, testing relationships and loyalties and forcing everyone to reconsider what family really means.

A film full of sensibility, humiliation of the unspoken hard working class barriers that exist mainly when the live-in housekeeper’s daughter suddenly appears and realizes of her mother real world. A pure division among social class between Val and Barbara, her employer. Definitely, this is very well structured in its plot and performances in which the main topic is about upper-class stereotypes and Jéssica gets increasingly fed up with her mother’s willingness to be patronized and humiliated by her employers.