Word: maids
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There are "characters," too, members of an American family in Simon Watson Taylor's translation of the French original. They are, all but one, fairly normal people: a middle-aged father and mother, their young daughter, their contentious maid-of-all-work, and, for a single scene, a visitor from an apartment on the same floor of an apartment house where they are presently living...
...schmurz is an endlessly silent witness to the strange antics of the father, the mother, the daughter and the maid of this family: people who would seem to be normal in many ways, for they sit and stare part of the time at a huge television screen where a hilariously silly soap opera goes on and on, interrupted by equally hilarious and equally foolish commercials. But they move a lot, and for reasons not clear...
This confusion is not unentertaining. Much is going on, and much of it is extremely funny. The performances, particularly Stephen Kaplan's as the Lone Star vulgarian next door, and Sheila Hart's as a late version of the French stage type of perky maid-servant (with an outlandish Swedish-Down Home accent), are both hilarious and determinedly enigmatic...
...hilarious parts are also home-movie: the maid chewing an apple as she answers the phone makes you laugh from inside. And there is the enterprising bellboy who turns up as a waiter in a restaurant and finally as the owner of the ski lodge where Robert catches up with Catherine...
Frazer Lively, as Marie Jeanne, the doyenne of the kitchen, gives the appearance of power even if she never quite realizes it in practice. Amy Sue Allen, the pregnant maid, projects her pain well--so well, in fact, that her expressiveness sometimes drowns out comprehensibility...