Film Review: Roma — Alfonso Cuarón (2018)
Memories, nostalgia, paternal abandonment, neo-colonial relations in Mexico, youth and its eternal optimism — these are only some of the themes Cuarón addresses in Roma, his black and white love letter to the nanny who helped raise him.
Context
The backdrop of the film is the turbulent Mexican period of the late 60s / early 70s where much like the rest of the world, the country was experiencing political unrest and student protests.
The film takes place around the Corpus Christi Massacre (a massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City on June 10, 1971 by Los Halcones, a right wing paramilitary group trained by the CIA to fight against left wing activism in Mexico). However, these events are just the backdrop and a historical grounding isn’t required to appreciate this very humanistic portrayal of a nanny and the family she cares for, going through turmoil in their personal lives.
It particularly looks at paternal abandonment and how the mother figures deal with its consequences. Cuarón recreates his childhood growing up in the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City and with hindsight acknowledges the difficulty his nanny Cleo (played by a fantastic first time actor Yalitza Aparicio) and his mother (played by Marina de Tavira) were facing, keeping the home together after his father left.
What makes this story so special is that its not told through the perspective of a young Cuarón, but rather through the lens of the family’s indigenous nanny Cleo. Ontop of the shared burden of managing a fatherless household in a patriarchal society, Cleo also has to deal with her own personal traumas complicated by a neo-colonial class divide of predominently indigenous housekeepers and white European upper/middle class.
Neo-colonial class divide
This class divide can be seen throughout the film — from inside the Cuarón family household, where they have two indigenous servants, to the family hacienda where there is a larger servant staff.
At the New Years party at the Hacienda, Cuarón has the indigenous housekeepers literally descend into another world with its own dances, drinks and social mores.
Cuarón doesn’t delve too deeply into this divide insomuch as to show how segregated the class system is in Mexico and the reprecussions it has on the indigenous who are the most affected.
While Cuarón’s family has the help of their dense social network of friends and family in times of need, we see Cleo later in the film left entirely reliant on the family she works for in her time of need.
The film also shows how easily people of this group are duped by various political forces even when they may inherently be for causes inimical to their own social group. This is the case with Cleo’s boyfriend who through his martial arts training is brainwashed into becoming a right wing paramilitary tasked to kill student demonstrators protesting against class inequality amongst other things.
Subjective nature of memory
This is not like most films about memory and nostalgia which try to piece together the shards left from childhood. Instead Cuarón wanted to craft a film that peered into the past through the prism of the present, an objective experience seen from the understanding he has as an adult.
“I think I wanted to understand how to put the pieces together,” Cuarón says, “[Jorge Luis] Borges talks about how memory is an opaque, shattered mirror, but I see it more as a crack in the wall. The crack is whatever pain happened in the past. We tend to put several coats of paint over it, trying to cover that crack. But it’s still there.”
After the shooting of the film wrapped, Cuarón brought over his real childhood nanny and screened the film for her to get her thoughts about how accurately the film portrays the events of the time. After the film was over he found her crying. Afraid he crossed some boundry he asked her why she was crying. Her response was that she was sad about how much the little children had to suffer in the film.
For the nanny the film was about the hardships the children faced, while for Cuarón, the film was about the hardships the nanny and his mother faced, something the children were completely oblivious to in the film.
Why is it that Cuarón has such as blissful memory of his youth while his nanny was brought to tears by what she felt was such a difficult time for him and his family? With hindsight now he can take a more objective viewpoint on his youth — showing the kids just playing games in their gated yard while his mother and nanny faced hardships.
Youth and its eternal optimism
Another recurring idea is of youth and its eternal optimism and one which Cuarón approached in many previous films such as Little Princess, Great Expectations, Prisoner of Azkaban, and now finally in Roma. When you’re young every day is an adventure no matter where you are. The difference is how much your parents are able to shelter you from the harshness of reality.
Young Cuarón growing up in a tumultuous period in Mexico and despite his father’s abandonment was completely unaware, since his mother and nanny sheltered him and allowed him to have his eyes on his space adventures and sci fi flicks.
In Roma, we see kids from both poor and rich backgrounds all having the same big dreams and playing the same sort of games. Regardless of their underlying circumstances they are filled with endless youthful optimism. The shots of the kids in the slums playing games in the mud are expected to shock the audience for the graphic realism but to the kids depicted they are on just another adventure.
First time cinematographer, yet lifelong experimentalist
Roma marks Cuarón’s debut as cinematographer — partly by chance (Emmanuel Lubezki, the go-to cinematographer for the Three Amigos directors, had schedule conflicted with Cuarón), partly by choice (in his interview with Lubezki after the film was made, Cuarón said he wanted a go at being a cinematographer after he realised they have all the fun) — but mostly because the film was such a personal topic for Cuarón and he wanted to have as much creative freedom as possible.
The focus on having an objective portrayal of his memories is partly why Cuarón opted for the pristine imagery of large-format black-and-white digital photography, rather than the grain of celluloid. The black and white creates an impression of memory while the lack of grain through digital instead of film creates the objectivity.
While some might think its easier to film in black-and-white, its actually more difficult because with less visual information from colour we need get more from other stimuli such as through texture and light/shadow. For this reason Cuarón had the all the film departments send him black and white photos of all costumes, prop and set pieces.
Not only did these factors make the cinematography challenging but as usual Cuarón tried to orchestrate very difficult shots such as the one below in the cinema hall.
In order to create the shallow depth of field effect here while keeping the characters still in focus at this distance with a dark foreground required a very strong light coming from the screen in the background. He achieved this through some lighting techniques he learned from shooting Gravity where he had to recreate light as it would be to astronauts in space.
What he came up with was a large rig with millions of powerful LED lights which can be programmed and motion sensored. In Roma he attached these to the cinema screen and timed them to the action on the screen. This allowed him to pull off the beautiful image we see above as well as to achieve a naturalistic lighting effect.
Its nothing new for Cuarón to experiment with his visual style. In his films camera movement is always motivated by story and tone. For example in Children of Men he initially tried to shoot on steady cam but the look was too polished, so instead he went handheld and gave it the cinema verité look its remembered by. For Gravity he used a robotic arm that rotated on multiple axes.
Cuarón is also quite enamored with long takes which we see quite often throughout Roma. In Children of Men the fluid long takes make the audience feel as if what they are watching what is happening in real time, making the whole experience more suspenseful. In Y Tu Mama Tablien, the long takes create a more intimate personal effect such as the provacative dance scene between the boys. Whereas in Roma the long takes are generally dolly shots that track the main characters from the side as they leave the house and enter the chaos of the barrio.
Another visual technique often used by Cuarón is the elastic shot that goes from either very wide to close-up to POV or vice-versa. It is used to reflect the change of persepective from subjective to objective. These shots really make you go into the world and the head of the characters and experience their suspense and then back out and see it from a more neutral perspective. Unlike most his other films, these shots are purposefully absent from Roma as the focus in this film as mentioned above was to create an objective lens for his memory rather than to emphasise changes in perspective.
Music
The music is entirely diegetic coming mainly from the radio in the house or car, but deserves a mention for the great job it does in immersing the audience in what was listened at the time. “It was mostly about choosing songs that were on the radio,” says music supervisor Lynn Fainchtein, who worked closely with Cuarón, mining his childhood memories, as well as her own, and doing meticulous research into what different Mexican radio stations of the era were playing during the actual months represented in the film.
One of my favourite songs in the film is called “Mar y Espuma” by Acapulco Tropical, played near the end of the movie when the family is driving to the coast. Its from a genre called tropical which sounds alot like salsa but is closer to a bolero and was popular in the ’70s in Mexico. Some bands in this style include Pasteles Verdes, Los Babys, and Acapulco Tropical.
Rating
Overall the film was fantastic for its expansive portrayal of both the turmoil Mexico went through in this period, the inner turmoil of a specific family, and the deep-seated class divides that are prevalent in Mexico to this day.
Where the film didn’t go far enough was in showing how these divisions continue to be purveyed. It follows an instance of the master-servant relationship where the master has the moral high ground but it doesn’t show us the reality, where the most likely scenario for all the other Cleo’s who got pregnant would have likely meant the loss of employment and a return to poverty.
Nonethless when we add the fantastic acting and the technical prowess of Cuarón at the helm of the camera department Roma really does deserve Oscars it won and probably should have won more.
Casual viewer rating = B+ / Film buff rating = A
Now before you go just enjoy the beauty of some of these long takes below!
