I return to the social dimension of literature and, this time, I add to the cinema: a book and a film about the paths faced by migrant women in France and indigenous women in Mexico when they provide their services inside a house where they usually live. , a family with the whitest skin. I mean the French writer Leila Slimani and his novel sweet song (2016) and the movie Rome (2018) by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón.
Leila was born in Rabat in 1981 to a Moroccan father and a Franco-Algerian mother, in 2016 she won the Prix Goncourt with sweet song and Alfonso Cuarón was born in Mexico City in 1961 and has won two Oscars for best director: gravity in 2014 and Rome in 2019. So the voices in which we hear this pair of stories are worth reading and watching to understand a piece of who we are.
sweet song: Slimani recreates the story of the Massé family, a young couple in full professional growth who decides to hire a nanny to take care of little Mila and Adam. This is how Louise appears in the life of the Massé, like a modern Mary Poppins who gradually takes control of the house and the children[1]
Slimani describes sweet song like a cruel tale It begins with a powerful phrase: “The baby has died”… The person responsible is Louise, the nanny. There is the mother of the children who aspired to develop professionally, which is why she hired a nanny who ends up killing her children. The story is dizzying and full of surprises.
For his part, Rome It has a different rhythm, the scenes follow one another slowly. This story happens in 1970 in Mexico City. In the Roma neighborhood he lives a married couple with four children, the maternal grandmother and Cleo the nanny. The indigenous nanny becomes pregnant and her boyfriend does not want to take care of her. She later loses the baby (she confesses that she prefers it that way) and the boss, in turn, her husband. The vulnerability shared by the employer and the domestic worker creates a bond of affection and complicity that we never see in sweet song.
The story is slow, I repeat, but it works. It uses parallel planes: in front a clear image, behind another blurry one that shows what is really happening. We see modernity in Latin America in the 1970s. It shows us the signs of the times: patriarchy, poverty, inequality, etc. Each one lives her tragedy, both have been abandoned, but the story does not end in tragedy as in sweet song. Cleo, unlike Louise, manages to be the axis around which all the members of that family that is not hers orbit. Although this is not a tale, as sweet song; the images evoke discrimination, informal work, lack of social security and long working hours, just like in Slimani’s work.
The truth is that we urgently need a cultural change and literature is helping to achieve it. These two stories are just one example of the social function of literature and cinema because books and films are like a notary public, they attest to what is happening, they tell us about who we are individually and collectively.
[1] Reading is living twice. (2020). Leila Slimani sweet song review. June, 2021, from Literature Blog / Book Review Website: https://leeresvivirdosveces.com/2020/04/09/resena-de-cancion-dulce-de-leila-slimani/
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