Reccommendation: Maid in Manhattan

If you’re looking for a feel-good night in on the couch, go no further than the 2002 classic rom-com Maid in Manhattan staring Jennifer Lopez and future Voldemort Ralph Fiennes.

While it may not win any awards for its script or some of its supporting acting performances, Maid in Manhattan is very much my kind of movie. I always want a nice, aspirational or even escapist (but real world – complicated I know) setting (Manhattan – check!), coupled with likeable leads, a relatively low-stakes complication (not to diminish the devastation that comes with losing employment – spoiler alert) and an altogether lovely ending.

To set the scene, Lopez’s Marissa is a Latina single-mother from the Bronx, raising a precocious 7 year old Ty while holding down a job as a maid at one of New York’s premier luxury hotels. One day, while servicing the room of a particularly obnoxious female client, the ever unlikeable Natasha Richardson, she is pressured by a colleague into trying on her client’s three thousand dollar Dolce & Gabbana white pantsuit. Soon joined in the room by Fienne’s Chris, a upper-class Republican running for Senate, Lopez is forced to assume Richardson’s identity lest she give away the fact she, a maid, was meddling with a client’s belongings.

A classic comedy of errors ensues, but the film’s best moment comes when Lopez, still assuming a mysterious identity to Fiennes meets him at a fundraising gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Having utilised her connections with low-level service workers across the ever class-divided city to procure a gown, jewellery and all the trimmings, Lopez arrives looking radiant as the real life Jenny from the Block has come to be known. From their the film finishes entirely predictably, but in the brief moment, both Lopez’s character and the viewer get to live in a world entirely removed from us – an undeniable piece of movie magic for when you might be feeling down.