Roma
When Alfonso Cuarón won the Academy Award for Best Director for Gravity a couple of years ago, nobody would have imagined that he was going to jump from a futuristic multimillionaire space odyssey with ultra famous actors to an artsy naturalistic recreation of life in 70s Mexico City. But after the magnitude of Gravity, how could Cuarón challenge himself in a more significative way? He needed to create a personal masterpiece. And that's exactly what Roma is.
Written, directed, produced, photographed and edited by Cuarón himself, it might be one of the most extreme examples of an auteur film (would he do a Shane Carruth for his next film by also acting and composing the music?), not only because of his intense involvement in every aspect of the film, but also by the personal trademark that he was able to imprint in it and the closeness of the story to his personal life.
Made as a tribute to the women who brought him up as a child, Roma follows Cléo, the maid of a middle class family in Mexico City who involuntarily gets pregnant from the guy she is dating, while the marriage of her employers crumbles. An interesting exploration of class relations in Latin America, and a reliable (but yet, romanticized) testament of the lifestyle, manners and events of a specific time and place. The beautiful cinematography on black an white knows how to best capture the great research done to bring back to life a city from the recent past from the production and costumes design.
The usual long shots that are a trademark of Cuarón transform the audience into a fly in the wall, we can almost silently inhabit the microcosm of this household, silent witnesses of a period of their life, but crafted with such care that we know for sure that there's so much past and so much future in these characters that were introduced to us. Every single shot is so carefully designed to find infinite beauty even in the most insignificant and common acts (the first teaser trailer was a single long shot of water used to clean the floor going through the drainage, and was incredibly stunning).
The director is proving that it was not the big special effects, the peak technology or the award-winning actors what made his previous movies so good, but his amazing understanding of cinematic narrative and style, that he is able to create something that goes extremely close to pure artistic glory (perfect beginning and ending, but a middle part that is still visually stunning but at points long and unnecessary) with the most basic elements of filmmaking and even with non-actors. The natural performances he gets from Yalitza Aparicio, the lead actress, an indigenous woman that never before thought of acting, and the group of kids are proof that he really knows how to direct cast to get what he wants from his meticulously crafted characters.
If Roma gets his name from the neighborhood where Cuarón grew up and where the story takes place, we might also think of the grandiosity of Roma as an empire that collapsed. The perfect life of a middle class family crumbling because of the patriarchal system where women are disposable if they don't fit in the plans of the men that they surround as planets to the Sun, but yet the way of experience the effects is different depending on the social class where each woman belongs. The subtle visual symbols that Cuarón uses to portray that patriarchal world (the perfect parking of a big car in a narrow garage by the husband) and to oppose it to the new found reality of the women (same car, same parking space, but massive scratchings) elevate this film to a place in cinema where only the very best films of the very best directors are allowed.
