As the film opens, we find a middle-aged Portuguese lady Maria Ribeiro (Rita Blanco) carrying a housewife's super-market trolley bag greeting everyone she meets in the street before entering an old Parisian mansion where she occupies herself with cleaning the apartment of various tenants and doing much else which does not "strictly" fall within the scope of her responsibilities as the "femme de menage" cum "concierge". We see that she herself lives on the basement of the mansion with another Portuguese man, José Ribeiro (Joaquim de Almeida) packing him his lunch before he goes to work, hands her son Pedro( Alex Alves Pereira) a sandwich box for the same purpose but which the latter banishes with a wave of his hand upon which she just lifts her head and throws up her hands in the air like a typical French woman faced with a situation about which she could do absolutely little else. She's also got a beautiful daughter Paula (Barbara Cabrita) who's secretly dating Charles Caillaux (Lannick Gautry), the son of her site supervisor father's boss Francis Caillaux (Roland Gira), who at the start of the film is trying to strike deal with a new partner because he is experiencing some financial strain and badly needs to impress his new partner with José's solid credentials as a reliable contractor as a kind of inducement. Then Paula announces to her boyfriend Charles that she's pregnant. He looks surprised but doesn't show the kind of enthusiasm she expects. Her parents will need to seriously discuss the possibility of marriage with her boyfriend's parents. For this purpose, Maria dresses herself up, had her hair done and put on special make-up and forces José to wear a tie and suit and instead of cooking her favourite dish when they come for the purpose, serves them what she considers some exquisite food specially ordered from a fancy restaurant, something which surprises her guests but for which they do not show any particular liking although they mumble some polite expression of their delight at it. This is something which Paula, who is born and bred in France, finds "disgustingly affected" when she returns from work to join the family dinner. She storms out. It's quite obvious that Maria meant well and is doing it for Paula's sake because she doesn't want Paula to lose "face" in front of their future parent's-in-law who is her father's boss.
Then the twist came. José got a special registered post from his single elder brother's lawyer telling him that he has just died and has bequeathed to him the house which he had so wanted 32 years ago and did not get and which was the original reason why he left Portugal for France in the first place and on top of that, a sizeable sum in personalty. He was overwhelmed but wanted to keep this a secret. But the letter which he did not immediately put away was accidentally seen by another Portuguese woman working as a cook at the same apartment and in no time, everybody got to know about it whilst José still thought that nobody knew! A hurried meeting of the tenants was suddenly convened in which they decided that they wanted very much for Maria to continue to act as their "concierge" which for many years have by habit included exploiting José services as "free" maintenance worker for all kinds of problems which might crop up but the ostensible reason they gave was that they were really grateful and "appreciated" all the Maria had done for them for the past 32 years. When José found out that everybody knew, he flew into a rage. He decided that he had had enough and deliberately made a barbecued fire right next to the roses which Madame Rickiert (one of the fastidious tenants) had asked Maria to carefully water and tend for her but which she had entered for a flower competition as if it were her own work. He caused the fumes from the fire to blow directly into the roses just before the judges of the flower growing competition were to arrive.
When the film ends, we see wine flowing and food in abundance at a party in the garden of José's dream house in Portugal overlooking a beautiful mountain lake, with a big bulge in Paula's belly and the Caillauxs joining in the song and dances to the tune of romantic guitar strums. What is the gilded cage in the title? Is it their newly inherited Portuguese house by the lake or is it the apartment in which Maria, José, Pedro and Paula had been accustomed? It's this kind of ambiguity that makes the film less straightforward than would otherwise be the case and which gives the film a kind of complexity which makes one pause for reflection.
There's also a side plot: the unrealistic Lourdes (Jacqueline Corado), the sister of Maria and a not very successful graphic designer who dreamt of opening a Portuguese restuarant with Maria one of these days when they had enough capital with her, with typical Latino fire, who allows her imagination to run wild at times and who would not mince words to express her dissatisfaction when she found out that her sister was hiding the news of José's unexpected windfall from her. I love the way she relishes gossiping with other Portuguese women in the kitchen with other Portuguese women in the film.
I like the film, especially the acting of Joaquim de Almeida as the silently and always obliging José who didn't care to put in his own time to work on weekends when the need arose, the way he ran into rampage when he found that everybody was pretending they didn't know his "secret" and the acting of Rita Blanco, who is always so accommodating to whatever was asked of her and who pretended to feel really at home in her "dressed up" meeting with her prospective in laws at the party at her house.
It's a simple film about the what the working class immigrants in France and the subtle exploitation they have to endure at the hands of some of the native French middle class and yet we do not see any sense of "bitterness" by the director Ruben Alves who dilutes the pathos with humor by "showing" with a quiet irony the hypocrisy of some French people. I suppose his trick is by showing how lovable José and Maria are and not by showing by contrast how "unlovable" the conduct of certain indigenous French are. A most effective strategy!
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