Film Review: Cuarón’s Roma Envelops the Eyes and Ears

Roma

Written and Directed by Alfonso Cuarón

My favorite current directors, each with an individual style and penchant for risk-taking, are Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood), Michael Hanecke (The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon), Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Melancholia), and Alfonso Cuarón. Cuarón has succeeded in a variety of styles, ranging from the realistic road movie Y Tu Mama También (2001) and the apocalyptic sci-fi Children of Men (2006) to perhaps my favorite space movie Gravity (2013). Each left me wondering at his vision of another world. His consistently compelling visual style always leaves me with mind-pictures from the films even after I have forgotten details of the plot. His new film Roma is more of the same, and has all the critics salivating. It is perhaps closest to Y Tu Mama También in conception, returning to autobiographical material from Cuarón’s youth in Roma, a walled-off upper crust enclave of Mexico City. The earlier film Y Tu Mama También showed how two entitled adolescents fare when outside the enclave, and when faced with real life in the form of a sensuous, complex, older woman. Roma is women-centered, more of a direct commentary on the enclave itself and on Cuarón’s childhood, seen mostly through the eyes of an indigina maid/nanny who holds a rich family of six together as the marriage dissolves. The contrast between the life of privilege seen here and the poverty and working class areas surrounding it are quite relevant to our times. The film is striking for its unusual narrative approach and for the immense beauty of its cinematography… Cuaron did his own filming for this one, as his longtime cameraman was unavailable. So this was a true auteur effort. Perhaps Cuarón made all the meals for the crew as well.

What makes this film both more striking and more difficult than his other films is its lack of a traditional plot. It is essentially a slice of life movie, and while there are peaks and valleys, these are not of the traditional cinematic sort. Instead, they are more like the ups and downs of your life as you might remember it decades later, including random unimportant events as well as big things like moves, divorces, and deaths. These are not all given the expected cinematic weight, just as decades later, a death might not register in your consciousness as vividly as did a minor family trip. It takes a while to get into this flow, but once you do, it’s fascinating to enter this very personal lens of Mr. Cuaron. You need to just wait him out without looking for constant dramatic clues about what the upcoming plot twist might be…because that twist may not ever actually occur, just as in real life. The wonderfully impassive acting of Yalitza Aparicio as the maid suits this well. 

She rarely shows emotion, despite her own personal tragedies, and places her job above her personal needs, as do many working class people. In contrast, the rich wife seems more buffeted about by her defeats. A wonderful recurring metaphor occurs when first the (philandering) husband and then his wife try to park their too-large car in the narrow apartment passageway, bumping and denting it despite meticulous care. Later in the move, after the husband has left her, she stops trying, trashing the car as she drunkenly tries the same maneuver. Finally, later in the film, as she has adjusted to her husband’s departure, she just buys a smaller car that she can actually park. The film is filled with such visual metaphors and clues, which serve as important a role as the plot does to convey the life of this family. In a way, the accumulation of details, like our accumulation of random memories, is what drives this film forward. Cuarón conveys the illusion that he is just tapping into memory, not making a film (rather like Proust, Joyce, or Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward Angel). This is not true, of course, but its what he makes us feel. These authors, via some variant of stream of consciousness, try to tell us how their characters feel, not just what they do. Cuarón relies on his images and selective depiction of events to get us inside his characters’ psyches, mostly rejecting traditional plot and dialogue to help us.

Especially notable in this film is its stunning black and white cinematography and visual composition. It’s a little ironic that most will see this film on their TV on Netflix (the producer). It really benefitted from a big screen, so one could revel in its beauty. Cuarón’s amazing eye takes us into the eye of a woman as she gives birth, including all the chaos in the delivery suite around her; into the waves surrounding two of the young kids who are sucked out into the tide at the beach, as we see them struggling from a very slowly bobbing camera seeming perched on the water itself; and into a 1970’s student riot crushed by the police, as seen from above from the windows of a furniture store, this time with an animated camera that conveys the chaos and tragedy. While a very realistic film in style, there are also some clear visual references: a mother holds her child like the Pieta during the riot;  the reflection of a soaring airplane is seen in the cleaning water as the maid cleans up dog poop (the world moves on as do our humdrum lives), and the family clusters into a Renaissance-style holy family triangle after the near-drowning.

Just as remarkable is the sound design—yet another reason to see it in a real theater. Sounds come from all corners of the room, a device normally exploited for sci-fi explosions and space battles. Here, we hear the chaos in the delivery room, including inappropriate comments by staff; in this movie we hear what it’s like to be in a riot; we hear waves closing down around us as we are pulled out by the tide. It’s part of the flood of memories that the director is sharing with us.

I’m not sure I would have had the stamina for this film in my younger days—its lack of plot would have tried my patience. But, having had similar memories of my youth, I was now very able to tune into Cuarón’s remarkable radio frequency and enjoy the film as a unique artist’s take on memory. That, when combined with the stunning visual images, sound, and cinematography make this a must-see--another great film by perhaps our greatest living director. Just as his Gravity showed the true artistic potential of 3-D, this one shows how cutting-edge cinematography and sound together can make a film great. This is yet another unique vision by a director who refuses to just repeat his past successes. Try to see it on the biggest screen with the best sound system you can!