Storyville: Inheriting The Castle (BBC4)
Fairy tales aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Justina Olivo is a real-life Cinderella, the maidservant granted her own castle by a magical godmother.
Justi is surrounded by her animal friends — a lamb who loves cuddles, a piglet that demands to be bottlefed every half hour, and a chicken called Love Of My Life who thinks she owns the place.
But the moodily surreal Storyville documentary Inheriting The Castle is 75 minutes steeped in loneliness. Justi spends her life stubbornly waiting for a prince who will never arrive.
Now 60, she began life as a housemaid aged just five, an indigenous South American child working for a wealthy Spanish-speaking family outside Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.
Though she was barely more than a toddler, her first job was to wash the floors, just like Cinderella. The lady of the house would yell at her for leaving footprints on the wet patches.
Justina Olivo (left, with daughter Alexia) is a real-life Cinderella, the maidservant granted her own castle by a magical godmother
The moodily surreal Storyville documentary Inheriting The Castle is 75 minutes steeped in loneliness. Justi spends her life stubbornly waiting for a prince who will never arrive
But the super-rich socialite and her serving girl gradually became inseparable. When her employers took holidays to Europe, Justi looked after the house, with its high windows, its turret and the surrounding cattle ranch. And when her mistress became ill, Justi nursed her till the end. The house was her reward… on condition that she never sold it.
This much we gathered from snippets of conversation throughout the film. But many questions were left unanswered, because director Martin Benchimol chose not to use a narrator.
Apart from the crumbling castle, Justi appeared to have nothing. Every morning, she summoned the cows to be fed by blowing a trumpet made from a length of metal tubing. But the herd was dwindling — sold off to bring in cash or lost to disease and the slaughterman.
Her only human companion was her 20-year-old daughter, Alexia, who seemed too depressed to get out of bed most days. Alexia was car-crazy and dreamed of being a racing driver, but she would have settled for being a garage mechanic in the city.
She spent her waking hours playing video games or practising the drums. If she were my daughter, I’d drive her to Buenos Aires myself. Her mother, miserable in her solitude, felt differently, and sulked whenever the girl went away for a few days.
Yet Justi couldn’t bring herself to turn the castle into a bed-and-breakfast. Perhaps the idea seemed a betrayal of her mistress’s memory: her proudest possession was a glamorous black-and-white portrait of the woman she had served.
Who Alexia’s father was, we never discovered. Nor did we meet the man Justi video-called every night, as she wandered the fields in search of a good phone signal. Her boyfriend flirted and told her he loved her, but though he often promised to visit, he never did.
Perhaps this film will change her life. No doubt hundreds of sightseers will turn up, out of sheer curiosity. I hope she gives them guided tours, and charges for the privilege. Cinderella deserves a break.
