Description In: 'The Maids' was one of Jean Genet's most outstanding plays representing the avant-garde of French playwriting when it was written in 1946. On the surface the film is about two maids of a wealthy Parisian woman, who resentful of their servitude dream of their escape and their revenge on Madame. But with wonderful high rhetoric where Genet turns evil into a sort of religious ecstasy, both the maids and their mistress are shown to be caught up in whirligigs of false illusions and inaccessible desires, which ultimately end in tragedy.