Roma

ROMA   ***1/2

Alfonso Cuarón

2018

IDEA:  In 1970 Mexico City, a domestic worker balances her own personal struggles with those of the increasingly fraught family she cares for.

BLURB:  Cinematic excess – the chaotic, formless flow of existence that can never be contained within the scope of the frame – is a concept Alfonso Cuarón intimately understands. In Roma, the filmmaker frequently packs his wide, long panning shots with abundant activity, every movement from the center of the image to its ever-expanding margins suggesting the breadth of a world his film can inevitably capture only a fragment of. This knowingly circumscribed perspective becomes the organizing principle of Roma, a film that subtly and rigorously modulates point-of-view so that we feel as if we’re simultaneously seeing a big picture (Mexico City social and political life in the 1970s) and an interior, inherently limited one (the life of a live-in domestic worker), privy to the former only to the degree that the latter can observe it. Literally from the first image, Cuarón’s visuals are crafted to evoke this bifocal perspective: acutely rooted in the subjectivity of Cleo, the housekeeper, while made constantly aware of the societal fabric around her, Cuarón’s panoramic shots by turns center Cleo and push her into non-hierarchical tableaux, favoring a Bazinian democracy of vision that refuses to privilege individual subjects through close-ups. This aesthetic ideology is not only in keeping with the neorealist films that are Roma’s progenitors, but is an elegantly logical approach to representing Cleo’s liminal social-domestic position. If Cuarón sometimes holds us at a remove in Roma – and the film can often be rather placidly remote, to a fault – it makes a certain sense. This is a portrait of a place that situates us on its material and spiritual boundaries, making us wonder about the multitude of lives we’ll never know, or only get to know through the cinema.

The Favourite

THE FAVOURITE   ***

Yorgos Lanthimos

2018

IDEA:  The power balance in the court of Queen Anne is destabilized when a fallen noblewoman sets her sights on winning the queen's favor at all costs.

BLURB:  In the relatively narrow but rich canon of caustic, subversive costume dramas, The Favourite enters as a satisfying – if hardly groundbreaking – addition. Like its forebears, most notably The Draughtsman’s Contract, Lanthimos’s film is interested in the absurdity and savagery contained within the decorous walls of the noble elite, its pleasures coming from how impishly it scrapes away the lacquer of politeness that typically coats media representations of royal history. The opulence of Queen Anne’s palace is certainly a spectacle, but it would mean nothing to Lanthimos if it wasn’t also the marker of an excess as monstrous as the power plays and debauched rituals taking place amongst it. The Favourite doesn’t have to do much digging to find the volatility, malaise, and perversity festering in such posh quarters. They are amply apparent in Anne’s infirm body and hair-trigger rages, so volcanically and viscerally enacted by Olivia Colman; in her advisor Lady Sarah’s incorrigible bellicosity, wielded ruthlessly; in the bizarre japes of the parliament; and certainly in the actions of the usurper, Abigail, whose monomaniacal deceits know no bounds. While the dysfunction and skullduggery are predictably, nastily delightful, the film’s real achievement is in how it draws out pathos from the interpersonal warfare. Even when his merciless gaze threatens to level the characters into grotesque caricatures (not helped by the gratuitous and arbitrary-feeling fish-eye lenses), Lanthimos uses the triangulated relationship between Anne, Sarah, and Abigail to uncover complex layers of vulnerability and desire simmering behind the crown, ready to be exploited. If not exactly novel as bawdy historical satire, The Favourite nonetheless haunts as a tragicomic illustration of how easily our humanity is compromised when mechanisms of power overwhelm good sense.