Whenever we look through a family album of old photographs, most of us ask "Who is this?" not "Who was this?" Photographs are always present tense, and so are all the elements of life the enrich us. This blog considers music, film, books and other communications that call out to me always in the present tense.
The best of cinema: Visual splendor with achingly moving humanity
Speaking up for “Roma” is like putting in a good word for Bach. At this point, any praise feels like joining a flash mob.
But the film has so many compelling elements that Alfonso Cuarón’s deeply personal tale succeeds on almost every cinematic goal:
- The production values are bottomless, yet never showy. To recreate 1971 on so many levels, as the camera lovingly caresses each detail without seeming self-congratulatory, is a singular achievement. There are street fighting scenes – remember, this is the director of “Children of Men” – of the 1971 uprising in Mexico City, vast expanses of shanty towns, an elaborate party in a hacienda, but it’s the street scenes in Mexico City that turn back the clock with a cast of many hundreds. The long tracking shots on the crowded streets, especially the scene in which the family walks to the movies, simply carry you away.
- The cinematography is gorgeous and transfixing. The indoor scenes have a luminous tonal range (Cuarón tweaked the tonality in the editing for a uniform warmth) and the outdoor scenes are awash in a high-key glare to capture the wash of light on the high Mexican plateau. The camera glides over details of housekeeping – washing dishes, cleaning dog poop, hand-washing laundry – but never stays trapped in the details. These images are narrative, describing lives.
- The performances resonate long after the film ends. The protagonist, a servant in a doctor’s household named Cleo, is played by a non-actor named Yalitza Aparicio, selected from 3,000 (yes, 3,000!) women auditioned in villages for the role. Like so many first-time actors (think of Wei Tang in “Lust, Caution”), her performance is naked. She does not assume a character, but the character is revealed within her. Few starring roles have been less showy and more powerful. The scenes of familial love shared with the family’s four children that she projects are the beating heart of the film. Cuarón used New Wave techniques of filming in sequential continuity, with the actors unaware of what comes next, and the naturalism of their performances fills each with the hesitations and uncertainty that fills us all.
It’s hard to know where to stop … Cuarón uses no musical score to manipulate the viewer. Each moment is vivid enough. The eyes can linger over scenes like Cleo’s rooftop laundry work, echoed in the distance by other servants on other rooftops, almost endlessly, yet the next scene pulls us forward, always.
The film is, above, full of love informed by loss and hope. This all seems true.
