Roma (2018, R)

Best Picture nominee seven of eight, and the last one I plan to see.  The newest Alfonso Cuarón movie, Roma isn’t the first foreign film to be nominated for Best Picture or Best Director, but so far, no foreign film has ever won in either category.  Could this be the year to change things?  Hard to say – it’s also up for Best Foreign Film, so Academy voters might shunt it off there, but lots of people have been eyeing Cuarón for Best Director, and in the Best Picture category, no one movie has a real solid frontrunner narrative, so the top prize is still up for grabs.

While it’s set against the political upheaval of land disputes in Mexico in the 1970s, this is ultimately the much more contained story of Cleo, a young indigenous maid working for a middle-class family in the city.  Cleaning their house, corralling their dog, and caring for their children, Cleo carries on despite a number of hardships:  her own, those of the family she serves, and the growing unrest of the country around them.

When it comes to the setting, I’m reminded a little bit of a movie like Good Vibrations, which is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles but isn’t really about the Troubles.  This film is similar.  There are references to the danger in the streets, and the immediacy of the country’s issues to Cleo and the family rises and falls; there’s a major scene near the end set during a protest that turns violent, but there are other times when it exists merely as throwaway lines or as a parade march in the background.  I’ll admit to not having much knowledge to back up this part of the plot.  However, its overall use is interesting, as it’s a good demonstration of the way that life continues in every other respect even as political unrest encroaches on people’s lives.

Instead, we focuses on the day-to-day details of Cleo’s life and the various struggles she encounters.  It’s for the most part a fairly quiet film, capturing the monotony of Cleo’s work, mixed with the simple pleasures she takes for herself in in-between moments, mixed with the genuine affection the family she works for seems to have for her.  The storyline is less plot-driven, more incidental and character-focused, but it gets its job done, delivering really stellar visuals along the way – the camera work is beautiful, and it’s no wonder that Cuarón is also nominated for his cinematography.

Honestly, though, while it’s very good, I’d hoped to like it more than I did.  It gets very slow in places, either from the pacing within the scenes themselves or in detours that don’t feel altogether necessary.  There are some absolute knockout sequences, and the nominated actresses (Yalitza Aparicio for Leading as Cleo and Marina de Tavira for Supporting as her employer) turn in fine, subtle work.  But it struggles to hold my attention throughout, and there are times when it just feels too ponderous and artsy – this coming from someone who often likes a certain amount of ponderous artsiness in a film.

One last note:  I really appreciate that the subtitles use brackets when Cleo and other indigenous characters are speaking Mixtec instead of Spanish – as a dumb American who only knows two languages (and one of them is ASL,) I don’t always recognize when one language I don’t speak switches to another, so it helps me keep track of how language is used in the film better.

Warnings

Violence, sexual content, language, drinking, and thematic elements.