Chela (Ana Brun) and Chiquita (Margarita Irun) have been together for 30 years, a lesbian couple of the elite class, living in a large home in Paraguay’s capital Asunción. Their relationship is one of opposites: Chela, a painter, is introverted and subdued, while Chiquita is extroverted and passionate. Their home is filled with family heirlooms, all of which they are auctioning off to pay Chiquita's massive debts. When Chiquita is given a short prison sentence for fraud, Chela is left alone in the home for the first time. Before Chiquita goes to prison, she hires a maid (Nilda Gonzalez), training her in how Chela likes her breakfast tray arranged. Chela and Chiquita live in a world where you no longer have any furniture in your house, and one of you is off to jail because of unpaid debts, but you still have a maid. "The Heiresses" is filled with details like this, the unspoken assumptions of class and privilege, and what happens when those boundaries start breaking down.
Chiquita flourishes in prison, picking up on the rules and making friends. She's a hot shot. Chiquita is adaptable to circumstances, whereas Chela—totally thrown if the coffee cup on her breakfast tray is placed with the handle facing the wrong way—is rigid, unable to adjust. Her footsteps echo through her increasingly empty house. Almost by accident, and despite the fact that she doesn't have a driver's license, she finds herself running an ad hoc taxi service for her elderly next-door neighbor Pituca (María Martins), using her father's Mercedes (which she so far has refused to sell). Angy (Ana Ivanova), the daughter of one of Pituca's friends, hires Chela to drive her mother to doctor's appointments. Suddenly Chela is so busy with her new taxi life, and so drawn to the sensuous Angy she's like a high school girl with a crush, she misses visiting day at the prison.
The shifting stratification of class and rank in "The Heiresses" is one of its many fascinations, as well as central to how it operates. Chela and Chiquita are of the elite, but their home is falling into ruin. Chela drives a Mercedes but it's so old sometimes it won't start. In the hierarchy of service, being a maid is better than driving a taxi, and Chela, surrounded by her family's crystal and china, is now on the bottom of the heap. Angy, a much younger woman, operates in a world of sexual possibility, and in that world, none of these class distinctions matter. Martinessi is sensitive to power dynamics and the various layers of privilege in operation in almost every exchange.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lmJq2s7HSrJysZWJlfno%3D