Storyline
After leaving her daughter Jessica in a small town in Pernambuco to be raised by relatives, Val spends the next 13 years working as a nanny to Fabinho in São Paulo. She has financial stability but has to live with the guilt of having not raised Jessica herself. As Fabinho’s university entrance exams approach, Jessica reappears in her life and seems to want to give her mother a second chance. However Jessica has not been raised to be a servant and her very existence will turn Val’s routine on its head. With precision and humour, Anna Muylaert turns her eye on the subtle and powerful forces that keep rigid class structures in place and how the youth may just be the ones to shake it all up.
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Reviews
100
CineVue
This brilliant, beautifully observed comedy is a joy to watch throughout. The Second Mother's narrative works on so many levels, reflected in the film's ambiguous title, and the characterisation is flawless.
100
Muylaert does a deft job here of plotting her story and setting up her characters and their predicaments in ways that immediately invite reflection.
100
Village Voice
As we switch sympathies from scene to scene, Muylaert forces us to think big about the clash between idealism and acceptance, a philosophical war that spills beyond the walls of this small story into every corner of our own lives.
100
Wall Street Journal
Ms. Muylaert’s guiding principle seems to have been fearlessness, and her film, which was shot by Barbara Alvarez, is superb on all counts.
90
The script is executed with enough naturalism to ward off complaints of contrivance — all the way up to a tidy, but quite satisfying, denouement.
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