It takes me about six months after all the Best Picture nominees are out digitally to watch them all, which is always a good length of time after the Academy Awards are over. I will say this, though: Roma is a stronger picture than anything I saw from last year’s nominees.
Roma (named after a region, not gypsies) is the story of a live-in housekeeper struggling with an unwanted pregnancy, at the same moment as the family she takes care of is falling apart. It’s a beautifully-shot period piece, taking pains to recreate the Mexico City of 1971 (director Alfonso Cuarón’s birthplace), including brief flashes of the political upheaval rocking the country at the time.
The direction is loud and beautiful. Cuarón eschews quick cuts and closeups for long, patient shots that incorporate the whole room, emphasizing the relations between characters and allowing the viewer to really savor the milieu of the city, its households, its countryside, which are all beautifully constructed. This is most notable at the film’s climax (or, at least, one moment of climax), when a trip shopping for a new bassinet is interrupted by the unfolding of a government shooting in the street below, as the camera pans slowly from the second floor shopping center, past the frightened faces of onlookers, to the reconstructed image of carnage taking place across the block. Throughout, the camera takes the perspective of being in the room with the characters, adopting a single vantage from which it will take in a scene, and slowly, smoothly panning from one side to the other almost as if one is watching from the perspective of an otherworldly presence, a ghost or an angel, silently witnessing. The repetition of certain visual cues give one the sense of the story being endless, recursive, and the restoration of a new thematic equilibrium at the the end complements these cues. We feel, at the end, as though we’ve given witness to one revolution of an interminable struggle. Cuarón’s choice to set his film in the midst of a brief moment of political upheaval, which nevertheless yields to the continued dominance of the ruling party for another twenty years (the things you wikipedia after the film is over), also serves the theme.
The story is beautiful, loaded, complex, understated. The bonds between housekeeper and what’s left of the family she serves are surprising and poignant, giving a conflicted moral weight to the master-employee relationship. Nothing is too foreseeable, and so the tension is never cheapened. When a gun is held up at our lead, we really don’t know if it will go off. Yalita Aparicio’s star turn is gently understated — the blankness of her expression is just fragile enough to see her struggling to confront her fears, turn by turn, and the script (wisely) never asks her to play a loudly emotive outburst (that is, right up until the end, when her one great sob of the movie takes place, fittingly, enveloped in the arms of several other people who obscure her from the camera, in that shot that Netflix has used in all the posters).
In the end, we don’t know what will become of this woman, just as we don’t know what will become of her family, or her country. We have the sense that her part in history is bracketed in the midst of one long, unsustainable arc. Eventually the farmers must revolt, eventually the children must confront their father, eventually the family will have to grapple with its finances, eventually this housekeeper will either return to her family in the countryside or have to find a better life than this one.
But sometimes a brief period in the midst of mounting social tension is the life we are given. We don’t always live to see the glorious revolution. Things endure that ought to end. The unsustainable sometimes lasts far longer than it should. And we live under its shadow, and try to make meaning of our little interim.