A love letter to a mother mixed with a fable of psychological and folk terror. Nanny (The Nanny), the debut of filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu, who won the Grand Jury Prize at the last edition of Sundance, went unnoticed by the general public until director Guillermo del Toro put her on the radar this Christmas: “Hypnotic horror film. Symbol, myth and spirit come together to tell an inner saga. Charged with danger, menace and full of mystery and power. His remarkable color palette and rock-solid audiovisual storytelling combine with breathtaking performances,” he tweeted in late December, days after the Blumhouse factory-backed production landed on the Prime Video platform and announced that Jusu would be directing be responsible for the sequel to The Night of the Living Dead that Amazon is preparing.
The daughter of migrants from Sierra Leone and living in Atlanta (USA) since she was a child in the 1980s, the NYU film graduate and Spike Lee Scholarship winner made her debut with the horror story of Aisha (played by Anna Diop), an undocumented Senegalese woman in New York, who works as a nanny for privileged white parents on the exclusive Upper East Side (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector). Her only goal is to raise as much money as possible through her job as a caregiver so she can bring her son Lamine to the United States, but strange visions haunt her guilt at emigrating without him.
work till you die
Dealing with the horrors and experiences through the eyes of those mothers who leave their offspring behind in their country of origin to raise other children was a childhood obsession for the director. Her own mother was one of those home caregivers who spent the day away from home between jobs to improve her future. What makes a mother sacrifice herself like that? What is his fault? What toll does this mother-child separation pay? And how do they really treat these nannies in these houses?
Anna Diop and Michelle Monaghan in a moment from ‘Nanny’.Prime Video
Nanny seeks answers in a film that defines the American Dream as “working to the death.” And he does so by drawing on two West African myths (Mami Wata and Anansi) to convey the tensions and oppressions of class, gender and race that his protagonist suffers. Experiences as subtle as they are devastating, making it almost as terrifying to contemplate the suffocating nightmares the protagonist suffers – haunted by a Haitian water deity – or to have to contemplate, like a millionaire, compassion from those who exploit her at work required for the genders (“You know what it’s like, right? Being a woman? We have to help each other, this is a boys’ club,” her boss even tells her at one point in the film).
Protagonists, not props
Jusus Film is not the only one exploring the material realities of female caregivers from their perspective. For a number of years, fiction and literary essays have grappled with what happens to the lives of the women who populate the playgrounds of Europe and the United States. Stories to bury the imagination of Mary Poppins’ sincere and devoted nanny or the archetype of the sex bomb that threatens the family order.
Writer Emma Cline reversed the stereotype of the housewrecking babysitter in The Nanny (one of the stories that make up Papi, her latest book), putting herself in the victim’s head and exposing the vulnerabilities of some employees in the conflict with themselves themselves and are exploited by the system to reverse one of Hollywood’s most popular tropes, regardless of era: that of the sensual young woman who sexually torments the patriarch or protagonist. Alicia Silverstone in The Babysitter (1995), Marilyn Monroe in Niebla en alma (1952) or most recently in Crazy stupid love (2011).
Kiley Reid, who worked as a babysitter for six years, is the author of The Best Years (Sum of Letters, 2021).
“I’m just a babysitter, I’m not a babysitter. The nannies work full-time and a babysitter is part-time and they are called…if you want to go out at night or have an emergency”, Emira, the protagonist of Los mejores años (Suma of the Letters, 2021). The debut of the American Kiley Reid, who worked as a babysitter for six years to pay off her college loan, tells the story of a 25-year-old African-American girl who suffers an episode of racism in a supermarket while caring for her bosses’ (white) daughter because of a security guard’s suspicion that she was kidnapped.
This novel, which brings together race, classicism and the troubled lines between work and private for some payers (no matter how progressive and left-wing they believe) about women who typically lack rights or health insurance, comes together as a finalist for Booker, the New York Times, and joined Reese Witherspoon’s book club, whose television rights were bought by Lena Waithe (co-writer and actress of Master of None). A text in which Emira’s mother and boss, a feminist internet influencer, desperately trying to like her babysitter, makes up a game called Who among us is really the most racist?
Used and guilty
Reid isn’t the only one who has grappled with the domestic worker’s perspective. The writer Brenda Navarro also explored the experiences of these women in her second and most recent novel, Ceniza en la boca (Sexto Piso, 2022). His protagonist laments because, after migrating from Mexico to Madrid and Barcelona, she feels that they always see you “as a reference figure, not as a person”. A young woman who starts out as a babysitter to become an intern for €450 a month is in the black and comes into contact with a network of cleaners and domestic workers who call themselves ‘the cousins’, a sort of improvised and self-governing union for “there are several of us who no longer want to be treated the way they treat us”.
More vulnerable and isolated is Damaris, one of the three protagonists in Lara Moreno’s novel La ciudad (Lumen, 2022). A 50-year-old Colombian who has lived in Spain for ten years shares an apartment on the outskirts and the twins she cares for in a building in central Madrid, who “call her love and sometimes, out of carelessness or carelessness, call her mom.” ” are only true when the real mom is front and center. And though she spends the day organizing a house that isn’t hers, petting those kids and calling them by their full names to show them how regal they are “She feels a nostalgia that clings to her chest all day. It’s an old nostalgia that never ends, that there’s no need to cry for anymore.”
The writer Brenda Navarro, on January 31, 2021 in Madrid.
It is precisely this guilt that the journalist Begoña Gómez Urzáiz has asked in her essay Las Abandonadoras (Destino, 2022), in which she devotes a chapter to the voice of those women who move far away and almost always leave their children in the care of their own mothers, oceans to cross and to devote oneself to raising the children of others. Women who, as the author explains, hardly allow themselves to grow their lives or have a partner here, and who are “ruthless with themselves and refuse any relief, any distraction that can take place away from their children as if they had to punish themselves.” for something”.
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