Post by StevePulaski on Feb 25, 2019 15:43:55 GMT -5
Roma (2018)
Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Rating: ★★★
Alfonso Cuarón's Roma begins with a remarkably elegant, beautiful shot. It's a close-up of a stone-paved driveway with soapy water intermittently cascading over the patterns, as someone swabs it down with a mop. In the water's reflection, we see the sky above, and eventually a plane roars above. The credit-crawl transitions slowly across the screen but never obscures our view of this oddly soothing scene. After a few minutes, Cuarón's camera pans upward and reveals the woman cleaning the surface is Cleo. This is her story, and it's one that's told as gently as water gliding on a smooth slab of stone.
Cleo Gutiérrez is one of two live-in maids in the upper middle class home of Sofía (Marina de Tavira), Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), and their four young children. Antonio leaves for a doctor conference in Quebec one day, only to come back and inform his family that he'll be leaving again for a couple weeks — one of a few tell-tale signs that his marriage to Sofía is rocky and strained. While he's gone, Sofía and her children make Cleo feel like a family member. The soft-spoken, quiet young woman interacts with the children on a regular basis in between fixing lunches and tidying up, and save for a few forgivable errors, she's a loyal, dependable worker who is every bit a welcomed addition to their household.
Things change a bit for Cleo when she learns she is pregnant, and Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), the cousin of her friend's boyfriend, is the father. She's dismayed to find out she's carrying a baby, but Sofía steps in to take her to the doctor and supporting her throughout the process. But Cleo's worrying deepens when Fermín leaves her, and Cuarón spends the subsequent time observing her for a year as she exhausts being a maid, a caretaker, an expecting mother, and a life-saver.
Cleo is played by Yalitza Aparicio, a real find of a young actress. At age twenty-five, the indigenous Aparicio learned Mixtec in order to play the role of Cleo, and beyond that, knocks the role out of the park thanks to her ability to emote ever-so-subtly. Watching the tired, worn face of the young Cleo becomes integral to your appreciation for her as a character and Aparicio as an actress. She conveys so much with her body language in a natural, nuanced manner.
Shot in immaculate 65mm, in black-and-white to boot, Roma takes place in Colonia Roma, a village in Mexico City where Cuarón lived as a young boy. Cuarón has described Roma has a loving ode to the strong women who helped raise him, and the film itself doesn't play like a flighty, dreamlike autobiography. It touches on the more negative, upsetting aspects of feeling like an outsider even when you're on the inside, of course from Cleo's perspective as a maid. While needed when the children are in danger or crying, Cleo does her best to avoid family conflict, which becomes increasingly difficult as Antonio's absence weighs on Sofía and their children: two boys and two girls. Cuarón could've used the premise to evoke a precious package of serene emotion that might've bogged down an otherwise intimate look at a broken family. Instead, he creates a pastiche that serves as a loving homage to a city he clearly loves and the medium of cinema that inspired him from an early age. I, too, believe it isn't a coincidence that his film shares the title of Federico Fellini's 1972 picture (although his film focused on Rome).
It's during a showing of a French comedy, La Grande Vadrouille, attended by Cleo and Fermín, where Fermín leaves to go to the bathroom just before the end credits of the film only to never routine that illustrates, that expresses the power of cinema as escapism, among many other things. The obvious moment of heartbreak is that Fermín wants nothing to do with Cleo, not to mention thinks so little of her that he'll leave in the middle of their movie-date. The other instances comes when a disheartened Cleo turns away from the screen just as the credits appear and the curtain closes, looking for her lover who will never routine and absolutely crushed that he thought missing the final moments of a movie was too worth getting as far away from her as possible.
Roma is filled with many keen moments, many emotionally gutting, many bittersweet, and all gorgeously filmed. By electing to use the timeless color-scheme of black-and-white, Cuarón captures the essence of Colonia Roma in a photographic way, without waxing nostalgic although without a doubt the temptation was there. Cuarón also did the cinematography for the film, clearly learning a thing or two from his longtime friend and collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki, whose most famous work, Gravity, launched them both into the national conversation about one of the best director/cinematographer teams of all time. Cuarón goes at it alone this time around, serving as the director, writer, executive producer, and photographer of a picture that is so incredibly personal that it practically has his black-and-white fingerprints all over it.
Roma's focus on the quotidian aspects of Cleo and Sofía's family lend itself to such tender moments. The surprise here is that we don't see much of Cleo engaging with the children, something one would believe would be an integral part to the narrative. Cuarón remains hyper-focused on Cleo, but in doing so, he neglects to humanize her relationship with the children, whose names I haven't even mentioned, giving you an idea of how sparse our knowledge of them is by the time the film concludes. Almost germane to the essence of the environment the black-and-white photography captures is the subtle yet overarching feeling we get that Cleo's very presence in the children's lives impacts them in a great way. It would've been nice to see that, however.
Cuarón is a gifted director, and with Roma, he proves again he's a gifted storytelling and an extremely visual filmmaker, but not in the conventional sense. Rather than implementing effects or grandiose moments that call for a budget three-times the size of Roma's ($15 million), he makes beauty out of the ordinary, which I've come to learn from watching many films over the years, such as those of Frederick Wiseman's, that isn't necessarily an easy thing to do. The leisurely pace at which Roma moves and the copious moments of humanity it packs into its 135 minute runtime make it an extremely likable picture, and Cuarón's commitment to aesthetics make it all the more immersive and memorable.
Starring: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Daniela Demesa, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Fernando Grediaga, and Nancy García. Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón.