Just watched Roma and it’s incredible. On Netflix, very worth the time. I thought it would be kind of depressing but it’s not. It is, however, a movie that is best enjoyed with a particular mindset. You have to be ready to just chill, relax and enjoy the journey, let go of any impatience. While there is a story, and I ultimately found it very moving, there isn’t much action.
I’m going to give an example of something that worked super well for me, and probably hit me as hard as almost any emotional beat in a movie I’ve seen recently. One plot involves a father abandoning his wife and children, running off with his mistress. Early on, you see the father pulling into the family’s driveway at the end of a day. The driveway is very narrow and the car is pretty roomy, so it’s a slow process. He pulls in, realizes he’s an inch or two away from scraping the paint, pulls out, corrects his angle, pulls in, repeats. I was watching and thinking, “Sure, this is beautiful and atmospheric but why did I just spend a whole minute watching a man park his car?”
Well, there’s a reason. The father runs off. The mom is an awful driver—probably because she hasn’t driven much; the family seems to have a driver, at least part-time—but this is the car they’ve got and she’s on her own so she bangs around in it. Watching her park is painful. She does not have the skill or the patience to painstakingly pull in, back out, correct, pull in, back out, correct. She scrapes up this car pretty badly.
And then one day, toward the end of the movie, she comes home in a new car. It’s smaller. It’s not such a tight fit in the narrow driveway. She can pull in without a crisis. And the second she climbed out and said, “This is our new car,” I had this moment of just—intense joy and admiration. Really intense. Because I knew, the second she said it, that she was ready to move on. That she’d gotten over the worst of her grief and anger and she was ready to face her life, and the challenges ahead. It was so beautiful. Nobody ever explains this in dialogue—you just feel it. It was so well done, though, and everything about the way the movie was shot and paced all made this moment work.
It’s also just a gorgeous movie. Every single shot is stunning. Though this is where I had my only quibble. The director, Alfonso Cuaron, also directed Children of Men. And you know how when Children of Men came out there was so much buzz about the super-long single-shots? With a super complicated take that lasts for six minutes in a moving car with all kinds of wacky stuff happening? I heard about it so much at the time. And I liked Children of Men. I loved Roma! But it’s like every. single. shot. in Roma is that one shot from Children of Men. It happens so often that I stopped feeling swept away and started feeling distracted instead.
Especially because the long shots are only half the pattern. Roma has the super long shots, with lots of moving parts, which are always—I really want to emphasize this—extremely gorgeous and impressive, but Roma also tends to juxtapose a very quiet scene with the main ensemble cast against a very lively, spectacular backdrop. On the one hand, this works so well. You really get a profound sense of how while we’re all caught up in our little dramas, the world keeps turning, time marches on, life is out there teeming in all its glory and its chaos and its terror. You’re in a bubble with this family but it’s transparent, you can see through it to the shifting panorama on the other side.
It really works. Both as a spectacle and as a way of enhancing the essential core of the film. But it happens so often and it’s so distracting. Someone in the main ensemble will walk from Point A to Point B. That will be the sum total of the action we get for our main cast. The core story is so chill, there is so little action, they’re often just walking from Point A to Point B. And in the backdrop you’ll see like a wedding with a band playing and everyone’s dancing or hugging, or a man being shot out of a canon at a traveling circus, or police in riot gear attacking a crowd of student protestors. Just really wild stuff, and the ensemble characters often pay no attention to it at all.
By the end I’d see these stunning tableaux and I’d be like, “Wow, wow, wow,” and I’d also roll my eyes a little.
Final note is that the central character, Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio), is the maid to this family and she carries the movie so well. She’s quiet and doesn’t talk much but she has an amazing presence—she communicates a huge range of emotion very subtly & is so lovely, sweet and strong and good. The real reason why this movie never feels like a drag is because she’s always there, and she’s always good to spend time with. Really amazing acting.
I also watched Crimson Peak which… it’s fine. I dunno. Very atmospheric but no real surprises. I didn’t care much about any of the characters.