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.