There was so much promise in the first part of the film. That is, it seemed that in presenting the typically harried life of a working mother that we were going to get a big feminist statement, or better yet, a solution for this very widespread problem. But no, it turns out that the plight of illegal foreign workers is actually the main subject here and that part, the second half, is nicely done.
And it's really a shame that this opportunity to make a point for feminism was missed. I found it shocking that this mother, who is both loved and abused by her family, actually has a very high-ranking job in a bank. She is abused by her loving family in that she must wake up at 5:00 am, start the laundry, clean up the kitchen, run to the grocery store for breakfast food, and all while the husband and children are still sleeping. Then of course it's her job to see that they all wake up and get to where they need to go to on time. I won't go into all the details, but this goes on and gets worse as problems develop with her mother-in-law, and she is forced to hire an illegal foreign worker to help clean. I suppose using the word "abuse" here may seem harsh, but this "loving" family was unrelenting and selfish in their demands on this woman. I found their decision to send her on a weekend holiday in a hotel just as uncaring, and more to assuage their guilt than to address the real problem.
I was hoping that there would be a new way presented for women to break out of these roles of caretaker and cleaning woman and "good little wife", but nothing was ever done with this. The whole rest of the film revolves around the mother's new relationship with this foreign worker. It would have been better to make a documentary film about that very difficult human situation, and this film could have been a brilliant statement on the universal plight of women, if only we could have been offered a vision, a new way.
The directing was wonderful, sensitive, and unblinking when presenting poverty and injustice in the lives of these illegal workers. But I can't help but wonder why the larger, feminist issue wasn't fully addressed. Probably because the director is a man....
