Some three million women work as housemaids in Brazil. The bleak circumstances of this forgotten class might seem like unlikely material for comedy, but Maids-adapted from a hit play based on hundreds of interviews with Brazilian domestic workers-turns the stuff of sociology into bright, brisk farce. The loosely structured plot follows the travails of five maids, who frequently interrupt the action to address the audience, describing their frustrations and their dreams-of heaven, a good man, a new career. (Even prostitution is “better than cleaning,” one woman declares.) In the hands of directors Fernando Meirelles (City of God) and Nando Olival and cinematographer Lauro Escorel (Bye Bye Brasil, Ironweed), this adaptation is anything but stagebound, enlivened by jump cuts, sudden shifts in soundtrack, color mixed with richly textured black-and-white. Yet the film's high-spirited style doesn't mask the desperation behind statements like “Being a maid is not a dream-it's fate.”