It is a luxury not afforded to many to be able to walk around their remembered past like it is built of bricks and mortar, like the forest fires still burn and the dog mess is still soft underfoot. What would you do with that power, if you had it? Would you revisit the happiest moments of your childhood — the holidays, the lullabies, the ice creams? Would you root out the secrets the happened behind the doors from which you were shooed away? Or would you just watch your mother being young again, in a way you never remember her being because of the accumulation of days since that you cannot excavate away? If you are Alfonso Cuarón, and the gods of cinema decide that after the spectacular success of “Gravity” you have earned the right to do whatever damn thing you please, the answer is: you make the stunning, sedate yet stirring “Roma” and you do all of the above, but also something else, something far more ambitiously expansive and human.
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Cuaron, gifted this superpower for the 108 days it took him to shoot “Roma” has quite literally rebuilt the life he remembers in Mexico City’s eponymous suburb in 1970/71. But having done that, he performs a remarkably graceful act of empathy and refocusses the film away from the scampering children of whom he was presumably one, and onto Cleo (non-professional actress Yalitza Aparicio discovered by the casting director in a small village, and cast alongside her real-life best friend), the housekeeper/nanny of the slowly fracturing middle-class Mexican family that stands in for his own. And so “Roma” becomes an almost disproportionately epic work of intimate reclamation, a generous attempt to pull this one woman in from the ignominious sidelines of other peoples reminiscences, and so incidentally to do the same for a whole class of Mexican womanhood. Here, when the urban, professional husband and wife are breaking up while Cleo gathers the washing, Cuarón’s gentle somersault is that the washing is the primary action of the scene, and the middle-class heartbreak happens peripherally.
Couched in beautiful black and white images that Cuarón himself shot (as though even his symbiotic connection to erstwhile cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki would not have allowed him to get as close as he needed), unfolding almost wholly in wide shots, unhurried long takes and sinuous tracking moves, here the camera feels unusually present, like an inquisitive, active spectator hungrily gobbling up every moment of a solid world that will vanish again into the smoke of memory as soon as the lens is turned away. It is intensely real-feeling, but often the 360-degree shots, that take in Cleo switching off all the lights in the house, or trundling in and out of rooms with armfuls of laundry, do literally turn the film on the spot, throttling down any forward momentum and allowing the story, already ebb-and-flow episodic without even the propulsion of a score, to meander.
But that is hardly a criticism when some of this meandering takes in such vividly imagined, astoundingly recreated vistas. From the interior of a cinema in which Cleo makes out with the no-good guy who will abandon her after getting her pregnant, all while a Terry Thomas film plays (1969’s “Marooned” also makes an appearance, which should be of interest to future “Gravity” scholars), to the gloriously massive shot of the martial arts training ground near a shanty town on the outskirts of the city, to a Christmas party that turns into a conga line, these long takes of which Cuarón is so fond are dense with life and yet always have room to develop into something else.
And by the time the last third of the film rolls around, and the Corpus Christi massacre, in which government-backed paramilitary forces opened fire on a student demonstration, killing 120, happens on a huge scale almost incidentally outside the window of a furniture store, cuing early labor which then cues a staggeringly harrowing and realistic childbirth scene, the film has reestablished its dramatic footing. From here it never lets up, reminding us that Cuarón, even at his most nostalgic, is still the immersively visceral filmmaker who shot us into space with “Gravity,” as well as the keen-eyed sociologist who plunged us into the realistic sci-fi dystopia of “Children of Men.”
The highest compliment that can be paid is that, again, it does not feel like this world was created but uncovered just the way it is, as though it had been trapped in amber for five decades, or caught in a sudden Vesuvian eruption, with food left on tables, books half-read on nightstands and dogs frozen mid-jump at the gate. The level of skill it takes to create this effect cannot be overstated: this is personal filmmaking taken to such an extremely minute level that at times it can almost feel prurient, like we’re accidentally eavesdropping on things too private for our ears, like we’ve intercepted an embrace sent back through time and not really meant for us at all.
That, finally, is the true wonder of “Roma” — that it is an act of gratitude and respect so intense it almost feels at times like an apology, like an attempt to go back and acknowledge the personhood of someone entirely beloved, but who was loved in the selfish way a child loves. This is an immensely moving project, to summon into being the whole universe of the past purely so that the older Cuarón can pay attention to and appreciate the things the young boy Cuarón never did. The film closes with the simple title “For Libo” (Libo being the real woman on whom Cleo is based) and perhaps never has a dedication felt more earned: “Roma” is a film made by one person, for one person and it is our privilege, and almost a little bit our intrusion, to be allowed in.
[B+/A-]
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