IMHO and Film: Roma

I don’t think of a movie as ‘good’ based on my enjoyment of it. (My enjoyment does not mean it a good movie. I might enjoy a romantic comedy even while finding it predictable.)  A ‘good’ movie, for me, is intelligent or provocative or beautiful or juxtaposes disparate elements such that I think about something in a new way. I like literary elements -- foreshadowing or metaphor -- to be subtle. Sometimes I don’t mind being hit over the head with something if it is in spoof (such as the cartoon-blood scenes in Tarantino’s Kill Bill). I like to be gripped, engrossed, feel the delight or the suspense or the tension. I like to be surprised.

This is not a year with a lot to choose from. Not like 2017 which had Three Billboards, Shape of Water, Get Out, Lady Bird, Mudbound, and more excellent films. Even so, I do not understand how A Star is Born was so copiously nominated. The only interesting note in that film was -- after having previously heard Bradley Cooper say in an interview that he wanted his character to have Sam Elliot’s voice and so practiced using Elliot’s voice --- Cooper’s singer Jackson Maine telling his older brother Bobby (played by Elliott) that it was Bobby’s voice he’d always wanted.

With Roma (2018, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón) -- nominated by Academy for Best Picture, having already won Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Foreign Film-- I did not know what to expect, and I liked that. While I was uncertain why Cuarón lingered on certain scenes for as long as he did -- I did not always get their significance, even in retrospect-- still I found the images compellingly lulling. The opening scene of soapy water repeatedly being sloshed across bricks set me up to expect redemption or a cleansing of some sort. But none came. So I imagined it meant that Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio Martínez, nominated for Best Actress -- as is her female employee, played by Marina de Tavira) was the one to wash away all the shit (the brick walkway was continually littered with dog shit) which in her quiet, soulful way, I guess she did. As the camera takes in more we see the brick floor is a courtyard which, as we watch Cleo walk with her bucket through it, we note numerous caged birds. Will she turn out to be a caged bird? Later, I pondered the metaphor of the broken vessel, spilling pulque (a disgusting -- IMO-- , viscous, fermented --alcoholic--beverage made from maguey/agave juice): was the unwanted fetus’ male progenitor’s seman the pulque? was its spilling a protection of the developing fetus whose pregnant mother should be avoiding alcohol?

The juxtaposition of disparate elements: Cleo is the servant, an Indigenous, quiet, brown, young woman from Oaxaca (wah-ha-ca) working for a white, Mexican family with four children. She is both a caged woman and the one who is most at peace, most free if you will, with her calm strength, her courage. She is the only one of many able to hold the yoga pose, the tree with closed eyes. And she saves her wards from drowning. Bearing with equanimity-- all traumas in the film are born thus, as if matter-of-fact, daily life-- an earthquake, a fire, an abandonment, and a death (for which -- with use of magical thinking/psychic reality -- she feels guilty, until bathed in the love of her employers.)

This film portrays class/race disparity: the servants who are brown and the middle class whites who employ them. There is also a feminist element: a mother abandoned by her physician husband and receives no child support for their four children; a pregnant, young woman whose boyfriend disappears upon learning of the pregnancy; Her obstetrician reassures her this is not uncommon.

I was completely engrossed by the quiet, plodding Roma -- a Ravel’s “Bolero” that never get louder -- wondering what would happen next. I was delighted by it being a ‘period piece’ set in Mexico City in 1970-71 and shot in black and white. Cuarón was ten years old in 1971 and the film is purported to be semi-autobiographical. ‘Roma’ refers to the district in which he grew up, Colonia Roma, filmed, in part, of the street where he grew up. Cuarón includes the June 10, 1971 Corpus Christi massacre in the plot as nonchalantly as all the other events. His equanimity I found fascinating. [Perhaps as a boy he had felt secure attachments and safety while the world outside swirled about.]

Cuarón also directed and co-wrote Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013), and directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). He is the first Latin American director to win the Academy Award for Best Director (for Gravity).