Director and co-screenwriter Bettina Oberti's feature is billed as something of a satire, but it's more of a funny-peculiar than funny-ha-ha item. In Germany, the Wegmeister-Gloor family made their fortune in home-building materials. Now, patriarch Josef (André Jung) has been felled at age 70 by a stroke. Josef's aristocratic wife Elsa (Marthe Keller) hires Polish migrant Wanda (Agnieszka Grochowska) as a live-in caregiver at the lakeside mansion.
Wanda gets along well, if somewhat stoically, with the bedridden Josef, bathing him, helping him reach the toilet—and having sex with him, in secret, for extra cash to send home to her family and boys in Poland. The Wegmeister-Gloor women have had their suspicions of "the Pole" already; Wanda's unexpected pregnancy draws battle lines within the family.
Transplanted to America, this material could well have been a John Irving novel, perhaps with a daunting page count and gratuitous stuff about bears (instead, the script offers taxidermied birds and a recurring cow). As it is, the picture is extremely well-acted (especially by Keller), with just a big dramatic question mark hovering, perhaps intentionally, over the titular Wanda. Cipher-like and drawn less broadly than the rest of the ensemble, the Agnieszka Grochowska character makes one wonder if Wanda is indeed some kind of gold-digging opportunist and "whore," a good mom just trying to do her best, or a perpetually exploited victim. Either way, she somehow brings out the better nature of this stinking-rich dysfunctional family, perhaps in spite of herself.
The image of a borderline-illegal immigrant Catholic maidservant/mistress, poignantly fertile in a desiccated household of bluebloods, might strike a chord with North American viewers; just mentally substitute Latina for Polish and the premise travels well, making this a recommended title for foreign-language shelves.