[D66] ROMA

[A.O.]

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma: Art and struggle

    By Rafael Azul, www.wsws.org
    View Original
    December 17th, 2018

Written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Roma is written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu
Mamá También, 2001, Children of Men, 2006, and Gravity, 2013). Shot
entirely in Mexico City, in black and white, the work is a journey back
in time and memory to Cuarón’s childhood in the city’s Roma neighborhood
(he was born in 1961) and dedicated to Cuarón’s own childhood nanny. The
central character is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a domestic servant in an
upper middle-class household.

The film takes place between mid-winter 1970 and mid-summer 1971, a
period of about 18 months, bracketing the unmarried Cleo’s unwanted
pregnancy.

Romais a sensitive portrait of a family breaking apart within the
broader context of a social crisis. It follows Cleo, a Mixtec Indian, as
she performs her daily chores, which include caring for the family’s
four children.
Roma

The film is truly an important work of art. Cuarón has managed in the
form of a filmed essay—a poem about a difficult period in a family’s
life and in Cleo’s—to provide viewers a portrait of human strength and
dignity. He has done so without sentimentality, excessive romanticism or
hero worship. What is especially unusual in our day, the writer-director
(who also photographed and co-produced the work) chooses to concentrate
on the more painful and moving fate of the working class figure, Cleo,
and not on the problems of the various family members, whose own
conditions, of course, are worth examining.

In an early scene, Cleo washes the family’s clothing on the roof while
two of the children play around her. As the camera pans, one sees other
women, on other roofs—each working in the same matter of fact manner. At
the same time, one senses something unique about Cleo in this scene: she
pauses in her work to participate in the fantasy life of the youngest
child, an emotional give-and-take echoed in a dramatic episode toward
the end of the film.

In another of Roma’s memorable sequences, Cleo takes a city bus to the
outskirts of the city. The scene in the shanty-town, composed of
cardboard and tin shacks built around a muddy field, provides a picture
of the life of peasant migrants who have been expelled from the
countryside by the suspension and reversal of Mexico’s pre-war land
reform and the resulting rural misery.

The wretched surroundings in this marginalized township contrast with
the vibrancy and creativity of its inhabitants.

As Cleo walks to her destination, the township is being bombarded with
political propaganda from an open-air loudspeaker, cynically praising
the benefits that President Luis Echeverría is bestowing on the
community. Interior Minister under the previous president, Gustavo Díaz
Ordaz, Echeverría directed the infamous 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre
in which 300 to 400 students were murdered.

Paramilitary training in Roma

An unknown number of students, workers and peasants died in the
so-called Dirty War conducted by the Mexican authorities in the 1960s
and 1970s against political opposition. In addition to those killed in
the numerous massacres, 1,200 people “disappeared,” according to
conservative estimates. Mexican human rights groups have collected
evidence of some 650 cases of civilians who disappeared in the state of
Guerrero in south-western Mexico alone, more than 400 of them from the
village of Atoyac de Alvarez. The survivors of detention tell horrible
stories of torture and suffering.

Other images in Roma, the shadows of men in paramilitary training,
children in a field, the arid Mexican landscape and the militaristic
parade of a high school marching band passing through Roma, are nodal
moments in the story and effectively direct viewers’ attentions to the
underlying drama and tensions.

In regard to the history Roma treats, by 1970, Mexico had reached the
end of its boom and was entering a long period of economic and social
decomposition, from which it has yet to recover.

The phenomenon of the urbanization and proletarianization of peasants,
from the villages and fields to the slums, throughout the postwar era,
took place across Latin America and led to the formation of a series of
megacities, Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and
others, creating, among other things, the army of exploited domestic
servants, service workers, street vendors and street entertainers like
those depicted in the film.

Between 1950 and 1960 there was an explosive growth in Mexico of
landholdings of over 1000 hectares (2500 acres), and an equally volatile
growth of very small farms of less than 5 hectares (12 acres)—fifty
percent of peasants were left landless. In the film, Adela (Nancy
Garcia), a fellow servant, whispers to Cleo that the government “took
your mother’s land.”

These changes did not take place without mass peasant resistance.

Of course, individual responses to social processes will differ widely.
But if the character is intended to represent wider layers, to be
“typical,” it may be somewhat misleading that Cuarón depicts Cleo as
merely submissive and hard-working, the first to get up in the morning,
the last to go to sleep at night. She is someone who knows her place in
the home and does not need to be told twice about things.

Thankful that her boss, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), does not sack her for
being pregnant, Cleo continues to do all the work expected of her:
climbing the many steps to the roof to wash laundry by hand, mopping the
floors, serving meals, etc. Her tasks also include waking the family’s
children, with whom she bonds, and getting them ready for school. She is
particularly fond of the youngest.
Shantytown in Roma

There is a suggestion, as the film evolves, of a special link between
the women of the household—Sofia, struggling with a loveless marriage,
her widowed mother and the two female servants. A drunken, unhappy Sofia
tells Cleo at one point that “we women are always alone.” In any case,
the lines of authority are clearly established. Cleo never complains,
never has to be told to do something twice, and never talks back, even
when yelled at unjustly.

The strongest emotional connection Cleo has to the household is through
the children. As it turns out, her extreme devotion to them eventually
forces her to go way beyond the call of duty.

Another element in the film is the baleful influence of the United
States. Cuarón offers a cultural critique, depicting Yankees or those
Mexicans who imitate them as gun-happy landowners, whiskey drinkers,
philanderers and butchers of animals. In one scene, the physical
training of a murderous paramilitary squad, collectively known as “Los
Halcones” (The Hawks), is shown being overseen by a US (i.e., CIA) official.

Corpus Christi Day massacre

On June 10, 1971, Corpus Christi Day in the Catholic calendar, hundreds
of university students protested in Mexico City, demanding political
freedoms and democratic rights for workers and peasants, an end to
repression of labor struggles and an educational system oriented toward
the elevation of the cultural level of workers and peasants.

The demonstrators were corralled by the military, while the halcones
brutally assaulted them. About 120 students were murdered. Wounded
students who attempted to hide were attacked and killed, even in
hospital emergency rooms. The Corpus Christi Day massacre is also known
as El Halconazo (The Hawk Strike). To this day, no one in the Mexican
establishment has been prosecuted for this horrendous crime.

To his great credit, Cuarón dramatizes that horrific event. Cleo and
Sofia’s mother, out shopping for a crib, witness the Corpus Christi
bloodshed first hand and are deeply frightened.

In a powerful and moving moment, a student, cradling her dying comrade
and crying out for help, demands to know why this is happening. Cleo has
a personal connection to one of the brutal killers. She goes into labor.

The student’s question demands an answer.

To assess the impact of Roma on young people, the Mexican webpage “
Reporte Índigo ” spoke to high school students who had just seen the film.

Yalitza Aparicio and Marco Graf in Roma

Referring specifically to the scene of the halconazo, 18-year-old
Abigail Ardavín declared: “Normally our generation finds it difficult to
imagine what happened in the past; it’s like we cannot weave things
together. When one sees how life was then, one can begin to assess what
has happened to our society.”

“There are parts that make you tremble. I think I liked the story. I am
still processing the historyRoma is great, great history,” added Jair Nieto.

The significance of directing the attention of young people in
particular to important historical events, as Cuarón has done, can
hardly be overestimated.

Though the two films are very different—products of distinct times and
circumstances—Cuarón’s approach and the film’s name brought to this
reviewer’s mind another Roma, Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s
Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945). Inseparable from the
historical events that surround both films is the not so small change of
human relationships. The use of non-professional actors gives both films
a semi-documentary character.

Finally, it must not be lost on the viewer that Roma, spelled backwards
is Amor, the Spanish word for love. The real heroine of this film, Libo,
was Cuaron’s live-in nanny, to whose memory the film is dedicated.

Roma has been highly praised and forecast to win an Academy Award in
2019. It is polished in its photography and sound and the skill of its
performers. Cuarón is a justly celebrated director. It is worth noting
that the filmmaker once explained that “My biggest source of inspiration
was my uncle Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, a world-known criminologist. He
found [Leon] Trotsky’s assassin, introduced me to people like Gabriel
García Márquez and constantly advised me to work with topics that were
personal, framing them in a sociopolitical context.”
Yalitza Aparicio in Roma

However, the impact of the often tragic events in Mexico and throughout
Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, when Cuarón was growing up, no
doubt weigh on the director. Roma is picturesque, but its long takes in
which events unfold before the often unmoving camera suggest a certain
passive and fatalistic view of things. It would seem reasonable to
suggest that this view is bound up with the representation of Cleo’s
unquestioning loyalty and that of all the servants depicted in the movie
(no other section of the working class appears).

In that sense, the overall vision that Cuarón presents is at odds with
the spirit of rebellion and resistance of Mexican workers and peasants
throughout history, in the 1970s and today. The 1950s and 1960s in
Mexico were years of intense class struggle, involving miners, railroad
workers, teachers and other key layers of the working class. These
struggles, which only intensified in the 1970s, surely would have had a
profound impact on those who lived through them.

Unfortunately, Roma leaves out that part of the story.

On 30-01-19 13:28, A.O. wrote:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKVYRtE-kXI
> ROMA Official Trailer (2018) Alfonso Cuarón
> 
> Roma review – an epic of tearjerking magnificence
> 
>     By Peter Bradshaw, www.theguardian.com
>     View Original
>     November 29th, 2018
> 
> Sublime mystery … Roma.
> 
> Alfonso Cuarón’s new film Roma is thrilling, engrossing, moving – and
> just entirely amazing, an adjectival pileup of wonder. He has reached
> back into his own childhood to create an intensely personal story, and
> this is the second time I have seen it since the premiere at this year’s
> Venice film festival, hoping to get a clearer view of those later images
> that on first viewing were made wobbly by tears. Same problem, though.
> Those coming to see this film had better prepare themselves to be
> emotionally wrung out.
> 
> Cuarón has an extraordinary way of combining the closeup and the wide
> shot, the tellingly observed detail – humorous or poignant or just
> effortlessly authentic – with the big picture and the sense of scale. At
> times, it feels novelistic in its sense of character development and
> inner life: a densely realised, intimate drama developing in what feels
> like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also like a soap
> opera or telenovela. And at other times it is resoundingly epic.
> 
> The film is dynamically shot in a pellucid black and white, which has
> perhaps made it easier for the director (who is also the
> cinematographer) to use digital techniques for exterior shots, modifying
> and fabricating period details with an ecstatic, dreamlike certainty.
> The streetscapes in 1970s Mexico City are worthy of Scorsese, and Cuarón
> stages stunning crowd scenes, especially his evocation of the Corpus
> Christi massacre, when around 120 people were killed by the military
> during a student demonstration. Very often, Cuarón’s tracking shots
> slide and snake us through the crowds to the doors of a cinema, where in
> one scene an audience is shown enjoying John Sturges’s 1969 sci-fi
> picture Marooned, which we can now assume to be an influence on his own
> deep-space masterpiece, Gravity.
> 
> Now, a note of reservation. This movie is produced by the streaming
> giant Netflix – yet far from being praised for having bankrolled a
> masterpiece, Netflix is widely attacked for intending this work to be
> consumed mostly on digital platforms, and permitting only a relatively
> small cinema release in exclusive partnership with one chain. It has
> effectively been accused of suppressing the big-screen identity of its
> own product.
> 
> Well, it’s an old story. Many great films here only get a tiny cinema
> release, restricted to a couple of cities, and Roma is getting a wider
> showing than others in the past. Some of the accusers are behaving as if
> they have never deigned to watch a movie on TV or DVD in their lives.
> But there is a point here. Roma has to be seen on the big screen. Isn’t
> it possible for Netflix to widen the big-screen release in the UK and
> also Ireland for awards season and the New Year? Doesn’t the prospective
> box office bonanza attendant on its prizewinning success make this
> economically viable?
> 
> Anyway, the year is 1970: posters for that summer’s World Cup, held in
> Mexico, are still seen in one child’s bedroom. The title refers to the
> city’s Colonia Roma district and to the director’s belief that Mexico
> City has been evolving in the four decades since into a non-imperial
> grandiosity, a quasi-Rome in its commotion and sprawl.
> 
> Roma is fundamentally the tale of two women. One is Cleo (played
> wonderfully by non-professional newcomer Yalitza Aparicio), a young
> woman of Mixteco Mesoamerican heritage working as a live-in maid for a
> beleaguered upper-middle-class family in Mexico City. Cleo’s personal
> life is beginning to unravel in tandem with that of her employer, Sofía
> (Marina De Tavira).
> 
> Cuarón shows how the household, though placid enough, is under pressure.
> There are signs of tension and dysfunction. The tiled courtyard
> driveway, which is shown being mopped clean over the opening credits, is
> habitually covered in the excrement of the family’s much cherished dog.
> The man of the house, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), parks his car in this
> space with a wearied yet fanatical care that hints at his own unhappiness.
> 
> His wife Sofía presides over four boisterous children, but the real work
> is being done by Cleo and her fellow maid Adela (Nancy García García),
> who are always eligible for the condescension of class and race but are
> nonetheless well treated. Antonio keeps going away for what are
> supposedly business trips and a stressed Sofía one day tells the
> children it would be a good idea to write to their dad, imploring him to
> come back. Meanwhile, Cleo has to explain to her dodgy, martial-arts
> enthusiast boyfriend Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) that she has missed
> her period. It is the prelude to disaster.
> 
> There is tragedy, comedy and absurdity here, along with sublime mystery
> in its extraordinary setpieces. At the heart of it all is a wonderful
> performance from Aparicio, who brings to the role something delicate and
> stoic. She is the jewel of this outstanding film.
> 
> 
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