Category: Alfonso Cuaron

ROMA (2018)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Yalitizia Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A year in the life of a middle-class family and their maid in Mexico City in the early 1970s.


The closing credits of Alfonso Cuarón’s intensely personal, emotionally powerful Roma state unequivocally (in Spanish) that the entire movie was shot on 65mm film.  This is an important choice with a movie that communicates its emotional beats with strong, crisp visuals that don’t feel like a traditional movie.  To me, Roma feels like looking through an old, well-preserved photo album of a family I don’t know.  But the closer I look at the pictures, the more I can intuit how their lives are no less important or vital than my own.

More than most films, Roma exemplifies one of Roger Ebert’s core beliefs about film.  He said that movies “are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

That’s how I felt watching Roma.  I never really felt like I was watching a film.  Director Cuarón (who served as his own cinematographer) uses his camera and shrewd editing to create the idea that I was looking at a fondly remembered memory instead of a traditional, plot-furthering movie sequence.  I didn’t grow up in Mexico or have a maid, but within just a few seconds of the opening scene – hell, during the opening CREDITS – I was sucked into the world of the film.

Another important element of this movie’s success is the exquisite sound design.  Over the opening credits, we see nothing except a close-up of some sort of tiled surface.  Soapy water spills over it a couple of times. We hear a mixture of street sounds, but not a busy street.  At one point a jet airliner flies far overhead, visible in the sky as reflected in a puddle of water. We can hear birds, and people talking and shouting in the distance, and a street vendor, and the occasional dog barking, and…it succeeds in placing you firmly in the world of the movie. It all feels completely organic, not engineered.

I’ve just realized I haven’t said a word about the plot.  The story, in itself, is nothing extraordinary.  We follow several months in the lives of a middle-class family in Mexico from 1970 to 1971.  They have a maid, Cleo, who discharges her duties with efficiency, who is beloved by the family children, who has a life of her own outside of her employer’s household.  Through various personal upheavals, both in her own life and the life of the family she works for, they all grow incredibly close.  …and I can almost hear your eyes glazing over as you read those words.

But, as is the case with every other film, what’s important is not WHAT this movie’s about, it’s about HOW it tells the story.  And Roma, if nothing else, solidifies Alfonso Cuarón’s standing as one of the great modern masters of cinematic storytelling.  In his hands, this humdrum story of middle-class life becomes a hymn to nostalgia. There’s a brief scene of everyone gathered around a television set, watching a variety show.  The sight of their smiling faces, illuminated by the screen, triggered a memory of my own family sitting around the TV back in ancient history, before VCRs and even cellphones(!), and watching the ABC Movie of the Week, like The Towering Inferno or Grey Lady Down.  It’s rare for a film to affect me like that.

I have to tread carefully here, because I want to mention a key event that occurs in the latter half of the film.  It’s immensely harrowing, all shot in one take (indeed, IMDb tells me it was shot only ONCE and not repeated).  In any other movie, I would say that it’s the kind of thing a screenwriter would throw in as a shamelessly manipulative plot twist, designed solely to elicit unearned emotions from the audience.  In Roma, however, the movie has so thoroughly worked its magic that the event, when it happens, is not shameless, but shocking and heartbreaking.  I was not watching an actor or actress.  I reacted as if I was watching a home movie of a real person going through a traumatic event, and it was devastating.  THAT’S the kind of rare cinematic event that I live for.

Roma is a black-and-white film shot in Spanish, with English subtitles, and which leans heavily on visual storytelling.  This may not be your cup of tea.  But if you like film at all, if you like the kind of movie where you can drink in the visuals like you were at a museum where the pictures breathed and lived and loved, then you owe it to yourself to see Roma as soon as possible.

ROMA

By Marc S. Sanders

Alfonso Cuaron’s new film, Roma, is a masterpiece in cinematography, sound, and empathetic storytelling. Shot in beautiful, multi-dimensional black & white, it tells the story of a house servant named Cleo who tends to a family living in the city section known as Roma during the year 1970 in Mexico.

Cleo is portrayed beautifully with quiet reservation by Yalitza Aparicio. I imagine this actress is not well known to mainstream audiences. Perhaps she is not well known to Mexican or Hispanic audiences as well. However, it would be so refreshing if the positive response of this film opens up opportunities for her within more widely known fare, much like Precious did for Gabourey Sidibe.

Cleo seems content to cater to the family that contains four young children and their mother. The father appears stern in his mannerisms until one day he leaves for a conference taking place in Quebec. However, allusions to this conference indicate a different story when his absence lingers on longer than expected. During this year, Cleo gets pregnant by Fermin, the cousin of a friend. Fermin leaves Cleo to deal with the pregnancy on her own, and in the moments when he returns to the story, it is not promising that he will commit to fatherhood.

Cuaron writes and directs a relatively simple story amid turmoil in a very confused country that centers on riots among the young citizens and men who are not noble enough to dedicate themselves to the women that cross their lives. Family is not convenient either. When a conclusion dawns upon Cleo near the end of the film, you can’t help but understand her position. What she has seen is gut wrenching.

To further compliment this work is to appreciate the visual sense and sound of the film. This is not a sci fi special effects extravaganza like Cuaron has accomplished with his Oscar winning Gravity, or the dystopian action depicted in his under appreciated Children Of Men (masterful steady cam work in that film, especially). Cuaron takes advantage of a crowded bustling lower middle class city with an overpopulation of dogs, planes flying overhead, music, and crowded streets of different happenings. I watched this film with my new 7 point sound system and this film is perfect proof that I made a smart purchase. Cuaron hooks your senses to engage you in his setting. Therefore, the setting justifiably serves the title of the film.

The photography is sensational as well. Cuaron hardly does a close up on any of the characters. Rather, he opts to go deeper to show there’s more going on in any one given moment than just what is in front of you. The first example of this is during the opening credits that are displayed over the course of several minutes on a tile paved driveway. First you are just looking at tiles. Then you are looking at Cleo’s soapy mop water splash across the tiles. Now you have a reflection of the sky above and you get a sense of how high the sky goes as a passenger jet plane casually flies overhead. Dimension is gradually introduced and the theme of Cuaron’s filmmaking continues on during the course of the picture.

Later, at a pivotal point in the film, when Cleo delivers her child (I don’t think that’s a spoiler), Cuaron puts the silhouetted profile of Cleo close to his lens and then to the right deeper into the room you watch as the hospital staff tend to the newborn; seeing the baby, seeing the towels held by the staff, watching the staff tend to the baby. Cleo is separated from the activity but she remains in the room, exhausted and discombobulated from what she has just experienced. A moment like this, I would imagine, would be good material for film students to examine. Cuaron proves that what you show in a moment can be limitless in the scope of a lens. Nothing is impossible.

Because the film is in black & white, the activity of the hospital staff never appears to upstage or overshadow the experience that Cleo is enduring. Had this been in color, a viewer could have been distracted by the blood and the sweat and lighting in the hospital room. It’s all there. It’s just not as distracting as a colorized moment might have suggested. Cuaron’s choice of black and white permits you to focus on everything. So, a scene like this is so wisely conceived.

Roma will likely be selected as a nominee for Best Picture and Director. It deserves it, much more so than many other films I saw in what I consider 2018 to be a weak year for inventive filmmaking. I highly recommend this film. If you don’t have a good sound system or a high definition TV to watch it currently on Netflix, then find it at a local cinema. To immerse yourself in this film, requires the best in sound and visual quality.

I will admit that it takes some getting used to reading the subtitles translating both Spanish and Mexican, and Cuaron takes his time setting up his story. You have to be patient with the film. However, I watched the film on Saturday, December 28, 2018 and I still can’t stop thinking about it.

Please check out Alfonso Cuaron’s beautiful film, Roma. I think you’ll be glad you did.