I spent most of December trying to ensure that none of the thousands of people I knew in either Montevideo or London who had seen Roma told me anything about it. Every day, it seemed, someone else would ask me: Have you seen Roma? By hook or by crook I managed not to know too much by the time I finally settled down to watch the titles unfold. A shot which, there is little doubt, will go down as iconic, the water splashing over the tiled floor, conjuring like magic a reflection which will come back into play as the film’s credits roll in the final shot.
Since watching it, I note there has been quite a backlash against Cuarón’s film. People find it too slow, or too mundane, or question its politics. Of course, there will always be naysayers, but the reaction comes as a surprise. It’s rare, in an age of hype, that a film lives up to the hype that has been built up around it, but in this case, there seems little doubt that Cuarón has managed to create a movie which will be regarded as a twenty first century classic.
In part because so little happens, especially in the first hour and a half of its two hours. The camera, (with Cuarón as DP), lingers lovingly over its frames. This is slow cooking, the flavours being left to marinate, baste, fuse, to produce a dish that feels as though it has exponentially transformed itself into something far greater than the sum of its parts. The decision to use black and white helps: the reduced palette serves to accentuate detail. There’s something of the joy of cineasta from an era where film was still in its infancy: that a frame can re-present information with the delicacy of a great painter, aware of every square inch of their canvas. It’s a film to bask in, to savour, a film which respects the rhythms of the artesan. (And here the reference to Enrigue’s Purepecha feather workers feels appropriate: Mexico is a country which has preserved a tradition of craftsmanship which predates the arrival of the Europeans.)
Which perhaps brings us to the politics. Is this a rose-tinted portrayal of the Mexican socio-political divide? The argument could be made, and there’s little doubt that the director is aware of this. The counter-argument is that this is a mainstream film which protagonises a female indigenous perspective, something which few other mainstream Mexican films have succeeded in doing, or at least those that have been widely received internationally. There will be debates about this, in part because the film is one that warrants and merits debate. A Mexican visitor suggested last night that the film depicted a romanticised vision of DF, and it’s hard not to argue with that. But Cuarón is using film as a dream-weaver and romance is part and parcel of that process.
There are other sly political messages at work, not least when Cleo heads away from middle class Roma in search of her child’s father, when the film shows the other side of the Mexico City tracks. The sub-plot of Fermin’s involvement in a far-right group employed to smash student demonstrates is carefully woven. The final moment of confrontation between Cleo and Fermin is contrived, but at the same time it helps to set up the gruelling, humanistic sequence where her child is stillborn. It’s a mark of the film’s potency that it succeeds in transforming this moment into emotional dynamite, crystalising the audience’s sense of empathy with the protagonist.
Cinema is the most naturalistic of the arts, perhaps even more so than photography, but no matter how naturalistic the film, at the edges it will warp and bend into something fantastic. It’s an inevitable process in the art of constructing a narrative which fits within the scope of a film’s running time. True naturalism, like Borges’ map of the world, would have to cover every second of the film’s characters’ lives and every angle of perception, an absurd, impossible task. A film as seemingly ‘documentary’ as Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Rosselini’s Rome, Open City, is shaped by the prism of its director’s perspective. The objective of recreating reality is a Quixotic endeavour and Cuarón seems completely at ease with this paradox, embracing the warp and woof of his naturalism to fire his and the viewer’s imagination. The cracks in the pavement where the plants flourish, that space also known as art.
When a script is written, sometimes the screenwriter will be tempted to put in a line such as: “In the background, a human canonball is propelled across the sky, landing in a rickety safety net.” This kind of thing is almost always written in the knowledge that not once in a hundred thousand films would this detail be deemed worth the cost of setting it up and incorporating it within a shot where it is merely background detail. Yet Cuarón has managed to get this scene made; he must have fought for it. Along with hundreds of other tiny battles he must have fought in order to create the world he depicts in its hyper-real entirety.
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