"Roma" Alfonso Cuarón: the first masterpiece of the Venice Film Festival by the author of "Gravity"

“Roma” Alfonso Cuarón is a film in which the Mexican director also made the scriptwriter, producer, editor and even camera operator. The seventies family saga in Mexico City is based on facts from the director’s biography. I believe that Cuarón took off not only the exact opposite of his main box office hit, “Gravity”, but also a true author's masterpiece.

All films are divided into three types. The first you are not able to watch, not checking with the clock: long before the end? The second (they are much smaller) are so good that you forget about time. Still others, the rarest, are also forced to keep track of time: does it really have to end? Let it last forever. “Roma” Alfonso Cuarón is one of the last.

It is funny that Netflix produced it, more glorious TV shows than full-length movies. However, “Roma”, despite the complex plot structure and the abundance of characters, is least of all similar to the series. This movie is in such a full - and even sublime - sense of the word that I want to write with a capital letter: Cinema. The only thing that is insanely offensive is a delightful black and white image, a frame full of details and its smooth movement that few can appreciate on the big screen, because Netflix gives priority to streaming. On the other hand, this (not for the mass audience) film will avoid the limitations associated with the prejudices of distributors: almost everyone will be able to see it, though not in an ideal projection.

"Roma" - undoubtedly, the author's cinema. Cuarón himself invented it, wrote the original script, directed, assembled and produced. The basis of the plot made his childhood memories. He helped a brilliant production designer, Oscar-winning Eugenio Caballero (“El laberinto del fauno”, “The Shape of Water”), filling the house of the heroes with furniture and things from their own home - from the grandmother's chair to the portrait of the mother of the director in childhood. Moreover, he himself took it all off as an operator - and there is something shocking about it. First, Cuarón thereby neglected his faithful companion and the most eminent operator in the world, Emmanuel Lubezki. Secondly, he got no worse.

However, being an author, this picture is at the same time extremely democratic. She talks about simple and important things: family, growing up, memory. Moreover, about time: specific (the beginning of the 1970s) and "Time" as such.

In general, the film sets the bar unprecedentedly rare in our days. This is the level of "Amarcord", "Fanny och Alexander". Therefore, it pulls up to add a high-flow "now they don't take it off like that." However, they almost never take it off that way - a similar leap into the past, which turns a memory into a magic key to a world that has disappeared, was given only to the best of the best. Who would have thought Cuarón succeeded?

Cuarón always seemed not to be a dark horse - rather, a director of limited capabilities. His first film, “Only with your partner,” shot under the clear influence of Pedro Almodóvar, was a pretty comedy about an unlucky Don Juan, which became a rolling hit in Mexico and gave the director an opportunity to work in the international market. What he used, almost never resorting to the original scenarios: "A Little Princess", "Great Expectations", "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", "Children of Men" - all these were screen versions, fairly inspired and original. An exception was made for “Y tu mamá también”, the episodic return of Cuarón to his native country, an intimate and strangely melancholic picture. After it, the director again took up the mainstream. It even includes "Gravity", despite the obvious originality and formal novelty. Now, five years after her triumph, Roma appears.

This is the antithesis of "Gravity". After the flight - grounding. After the masterpiece of computer graphics and special effects - "analog", live, tactile film. After talking about the future - the irrevocably past. After the picture with the only actress - a densely populated universe with a huge extras. After the highly professional game Sandra Bullock, the peasant woman Yalitza Aparicio, chosen for the main role, is a debutant and not an actress at all. After Hollywood, a film in which English practically does not sound (it is heard only in one scene, where Americans who come to New Year in Mexico practice shooting).

At the same time, “Roma” in something very important “Gravity” continues. He is also about the cosmic loneliness of a woman. About catastrophe and it is overcoming. On the native land, which gives strength even to those whom the forces have long left.

The dialogue "Roma" with "Gravity" begins with the first frame - no less long and virtuoso. There was a dizzying three-dimensional landscape of space, here is a fixed plan of a black and white tiled floor. However, here the water is spilled on it, and a reflection appears: in it a piece of the sky is seen, through which the plane flies. Islands of foam on the water (obviously, someone washes the floor) - like clouds in the sky. Moreover, the water itself - like time, washes away all the dirt, even the most unpleasant: on the tile in the house where the “Roma” action takes place, the eternal excrement of a restless dog. Cleo, a young house cleaner and part-time nanny of four children - three boys and one girl, from an older teenager to a younger preschooler - this floor incessantly drags. Is it not an involuntary greeting to Guillermo del Toro - the same age and friend of Cuarón, the current president of the jury, on which it depends on whether Roma will receive the prize? How The Torpe’s “The Shape of Water” received it a year ago is another film about the courage of women and the weakness of men and about the cleaner and the water element.

“Roma” is a family saga about a teacher’s mother, a father’s doctor, a grandmother, children, their friends and relatives. A kind of autobiographical novel of upbringing, although not to guess which of the three brothers Cuarón encrypted himself (perhaps in all three). Alternate episodes of harmony and grief, work and entertainment, private dramas and great history; there is not even a fresco, but a grand novel in the frescoes, where the script acquires flesh in sensual images, instantly crashing into the memory and at the same time completely devoid of imagination, in documentary living and natural. The actors (some theatrical, other non-professionals) are flawless, but the whole construction rests not so much on the ensemble as on the fantastic Aparicio game. Or rather, not even a game, but an existence in the frame.

In the family novel, the author usually chooses the hero-narrator, his agent in the multidimensional universe. Usually this is a child, through the comprehension of the world by which the reader / viewer is introduced into the story. An unusual perspective in “Roma” is provided by the choice of the heroine: it seems that not a single “Childhood-Adolescence-Youth” has yet been told by a nanny. The story, however, no. Cleo is silent and tongue-tied, let her gestures and facial expressions are extremely expressive. There is only a look - an attentive and affectionate camera - and a hearing. In Roma, amazing work with sound, now subjective, then detached. Thanks to him, we realize, though not immediately, that in the frame - only those episodes from the life of the family, which attentive Cleo becomes a witness.

This does not mean that Roma is devoid of a specific plot and is a series of seemingly unrelated scenes. Cuarón delicately, but firmly builds parallel intrigue. Her husband leaves Sophia, the mother of the family, - at first it seems that she left on a business trip, and then disappears altogether from the horizon - and now she has to rebuild a life for herself and the children. At the same time, the first disappointment in love is Cleo, for whom the family of employers is closer to his native mother than in the village (in this “Roma” rhymes with “Manbiki kazoku”, the winning film of Cannes).

The touching everyday episodes of the “little lives” of men and servants, adults and children, are by no means built on merely nostalgic sentiment. On the contrary, they are imbued with a sense of growing anxiety, waiting for a catastrophe, which literally hangs in the air, continually waking up to Earth in a hail or rain. Microcosm and macrocosm are closely related, it is impossible to separate one from another. We are witnessing an earthquake in a hospital, a forest fire, a storm at sea, in which it is not surprising to die - and, finally, the "Corpus Christi massacre", shooting pro-government activists of a student demonstration in Mexico City in 1971. Only women's ability for forgiveness and understanding, women's endurance and courage here oppose the basic instinct of men - the desire for domination and power. This makes Roma also a modern film.