Of the “three amigos”, as they like to call themselves – a trio of Mexican filmmakers Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón, known for being critically praised and practically synonymous with the most prestigious awards – the latter can be considered the most technically accomplished. Each of his works is a delight for that segment of hardened cinephiles for whom form is more important than content. Cuarón's insistence on production quality is perhaps best seen in the fact that nearly five years passed between his praised and Oscar-winning Gravity and his next film. Such perfectionism paid off, at least judging by the Golden Lion which his latest film Roma won at the 2018 Venice Film Festival.
On the other hand, Cuarón will drive away part of the hardened cinephile crowd with his heretical collaboration with Netflix – that is, by agreeing to have his film shown on small screens immediately after a nominal and practically non-existent cinema distribution, thereby largely compromising the "purity of the cinematic experience".
Roma can be considered the most personal work in Cuarón's filmography, given that it is largely autobiographical in nature – dedicated to Libo Rodriguez, the nanny who raised him in the early 1970s when he grew up in Mexico City. Roma represents a kind of play on words, an allusion to Fellini's semi-autobiographical 1972 film of the same name, but it also refers to Colonia Roma, a district of the Mexican capital which, at the time the story takes place, was inhabited by members of the middle or upper-middle class. This is where the family belongs in which the protagonist Cleodegaria “Cleo” Gutierrez (Yalitza Aparicio) is employed – a young Indigenous woman who, besides regular household chores, also looks after the four children of her employer, Sofia (Maria de Tavira), and is so good at it that she is considered part of the family.
Their life, however, is far from idyllic, as will become apparent over the course of a year through several crises. Cleo becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, who leaves her immediately upon finding out; as she faces the possible consequences of the pregnancy on her job, Sofia faces the realisation that her husband, a distinguished doctor, has left her and the children for a younger woman; the problems of Cleo and her employer will, one day, collide with the smouldering political tensions in the country on the day the leftist student body took the then-president Echeverría's announcements about freedom of assembly too seriously, resulting in one of the bloodiest events in modern Mexican history.
Cuarón made his film the most personal not only in terms of content, but also through form. He not only directed Roma and wrote the screenplay for it, but also served as cinematographer and editor. This manifests itself in a perfectionist approach, but also in an uncompromising insistence on "art film" techniques. The black-and-white cinematography immediately catches the eye, as does the insistence on extremely long, uninterrupted and often static shots, some of which contain enough material for another, more conventionally inclined filmmaker to make a feature-length film. On the other hand, the "art" character of the film can also be seen in its episodic nature, that is, the lack of a solid plot or explicit narrative. Cuarón mostly leaves it to the viewers to connect the dots, or to conclude what is actually happening to Cleo, her quasi-family, and the country she lives in.
Cuarón displays exceptional skill in creating several striking scenes, most notably those in the shop from which Cleo witnesses violence in the streets, in the operating theatre, and, of course, the final one on the beach which served as the film's poster. In doing so, Cuarón will throw out the occasional hook for the targeted art-snob or SJW audience, whether it's references to popular 1960s films such as the French comedy The Great Adventure or the scene in which Sofia, after a few too many glasses, expresses her own understanding of the position of women in the modern world to her employee.
However, all these interesting details come packaged together with some that are not so interesting – that is, they represent pure time-wasting. Some of these scenes are either incomprehensible or too pretentious (like the one in which a character sings a Nordic song while a fire is put out around him), and because of them, Roma, especially in its first parts, is an extremely demanding film for viewers who haven't previously armed themselves with patience. Perhaps because of this, the decision to go with Netflix was the right one, because without the lifesaving pause icon and the option to doze off for a few hours afterwards, Roma would have been utterly unbearable. This way, the impression is saved, and Cuarón's film justifies a thumbs up, albeit not as justified as the ecstatic reviews and prestigious awards it received.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version was posted here.)
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