The Maid

August 2, 1991. A Friday. Somewhere between the summer blockbusters and the fall prestige pictures, a small romantic comedy called The Maid slipped into theaters. It starred Martin Sheen and Jacqueline Bisset, was shot in English in Paris, and ran a brisk 84 minutes. Then it vanished.

Sheen plays Anthony Wayne, an American who takes a job at a Paris bank and falls for Nicole Chantrelle (Bisset). The complication is that she is both his boss and his colleague, which makes a normal office romance messy. So Anthony does something abnormal: he takes a second job as Nicole's maid, working in her household in disguise while keeping his bank identity intact. It is a cross-dressing premise in the tradition of Tootsie, arriving a year before Mrs. Doubtfire would take the same basic idea to the box office stratosphere.

Ian Toynton directed from a script by Timothy Prager, and Monique Annaud produced for Chemical Films, Chrysalide Film, and The Movie Group. The supporting cast includes Victoria Shalet as Marie, Jean-Pierre Cassel as C.P. Olivier, and James Faulkner as Laurent Leclair. Critics mostly shrugged. The film barely registered commercially. Today its IMDb page lists 28 votes, which is less an audience than a rounding error. It survives as a footnote in the filmographies of its two leads and as a curious artifact of an era when cross-dressing comedies were still considered a viable genre. [edit]

Anthony Wayne arrives in Paris with a bank job and not much else. He is American, adrift in a city that runs on its own rhythm, and the film establishes him as a man slightly out of step with his surroundings. At the bank he meets Nicole Chantrelle. She is elegant, French, and, as it turns out, his superior. The attraction is immediate and inconvenient. Office hierarchy turns every glance into a complication, every conversation into something that could be misread by colleagues.

Anthony's solution is not a quiet word with HR. It is a disguise. He learns that Nicole needs a maid, and he applies for the position. The film does not spend much time on the logistics of how a man convinces a Paris household that he is a woman applying for domestic work. It simply puts Sheen in a uniform and lets the double identity do its work. By day he is Anthony Wayne, bank employee. By other hours he is the maid, moving through Nicole's home, seeing her life from an angle no colleague ever would.

The household gives the film its supporting cast and its comic business. Marie, played by Victoria Shalet, is a child in Nicole's orbit, and the maid role puts Anthony in proximity to her in ways his bank persona never could. Jean-Pierre Cassel appears as C.P. Olivier, James Faulkner as Laurent Leclair, Dominic Gould as Pierre Meyer, Catherine Lachens as Catherine Olivier. These are the people who populate Nicole's world, and Anthony, as the maid, gets to observe them without being seen as a peer. The disguise is a kind of invisibility, and the film gets some mileage from the things a servant overhears.

The tension builds from the obvious place. Every additional day Anthony spends as the maid is another day the lie could collapse. A colleague could spot him. Nicole could recognize something in his face or his voice or the way he moves. The bank and the household are two separate stages, and Anthony is performing on both, and the film's engine is the fear that the walls between them will give way.

What complicates the deception is that it works. As the maid, Anthony gets closer to Nicole than he ever could as a colleague. He sees her domestic life, her routines, her unguarded moments. The romance that stalled at the bank starts to move in the house. But it moves under false pretenses, and the film knows it. The closer Anthony gets, the worse the eventual reveal will be. The comedy is built on a clock that the audience can hear ticking even when Anthony cannot.

The film keeps its tone light. This is not a drama about deception and its costs. It is a romantic comedy that uses the disguise as a way to talk about the gap between who people are at work and who they are at home. Anthony wants to know Nicole, and the only way he can figure out how is to become someone else entirely. Whether that is romantic or pathological is a question the film mostly avoids asking.[edit]