Five Comments on Roma

Alfonso Cuarón's Roma has been generating a lot of conversation recently, for reasons that sometimes seem only tangentially connected to the film itself.  First, because it's a serious Oscar contender shot in black and white, with dialogue in Spanish and Mixtec, and starring a complete newcomer.  Second, because it's a Netflix movie that is probably the platform's first genuine masterpiece, which has also led to a side-conversation about whether it's worth watching on a home screen or even a personal device.  (As one of the people lucky enough to have a theatrical release of the film near her, my answer is that Roma definitely benefits from a big screen and a theatrical sound system, but that it's worth watching any way you can.)

Along the way, the film itself, which covers a year in the life of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a maid and nanny in the home of an affluent Mexico City family in the early 70s, seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle.  Cuarón based the film on recollections from his own childhood, and has dedicated it to the woman who cared for him as a child, on whom Cleo is based.  As a result, I think some people have dismissed Roma as a simple family melodrama--especially since its plot revolves around the twin crises of the family's father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), leaving home and taking up with a mistress, while Cleo is left pregnant and in a lurch by an untrustworthy man--or at best, focused on its technical accomplishments and not its storytelling ones.  Which is a shame, because Roma is one of the most beautiful, moving, effectively-written movies I've seen in some time, and it deserves more in-depth discussion about how it achieves its effect on the level of visuals, writing, and character work.  I'm too overwhelmed by the film to write a proper review, but here are a few observations that have lingered with me.

• At its most basic level, Roma is a story about unequal love.  It would be easy to makes a movie about a saintly maid being abused by her heartless employers.  But while there are moments in the film where the family's treatment of Cleo is inexcusable--chiefly when the matriarch, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), lashes out at Cleo as she unravels in the wake of her marriage's breakdown, but also when it becomes clear that the children, though they love Cleo deeply, don't respect her or her authority--most of their interactions with her are suffused with kindness and love.  When Cleo finds herself pregnant and unmarried, Sofia offers her both material and emotional support.  When she loses the baby, it's clear that giving her time to heal and recover both physically and emotionally is important to the entire family.  In some respects, Cleo is even better off as a maid than in her own community--as she observes to her friend, she can't visit her mother during her pregnancy, and it's unclear whether she ever confides in her family about her experiences over the course of the movie.  The film's final set-piece, in which Cleo rescues two of the children after they're swept out to sea, ends in a profound declaration of love from both Sofia and the children.
  
  At the same time, we are never allowed to forget that Cleo loves the family more than they love her.  That she gives to them more than they give to her (and that what they give is far less than what they could give--when Cleo goes into labor and is rushed, alone, into the delivery room, Antonio, a doctor at the hospital, stops by to reassure her with a genuine concern and fondness, in one of his most human and sympathetic moments in the movie; but when Cleo's doctor offers to let him stay in the delivery room, he quickly demurs and walks away).  The trip to the beach that allows Cleo to fully heal from the loss of her baby, and experience catharsis over her complicated feelings towards her pregnancy, culminates with her returning to her duties as a maid.  Being OK, for Cleo, means going back to serving the people who just proclaimed their love and devotion to her.  The film's final scene sees her gathering the family's discarded laundry and taking it to the roof to be washed, as they sit together and chat about their recent vacation.  There's no cruelty or injustice here (beyond, that is, the broader injustice of the way Mexican society in the movie is shown to be deeply stratified), but there is inequality, including in the affection and care that Cleo and the family offer to one another.
  
  It can be hard to know how to respond to this.  Some reviewers have dinged the film for not pushing hard enough at the way class distorts its relationships.  It's tempting to accuse Cuarón of romanticizing his old nanny's life--Cleo is, after all, characterized by her cheerful selflessness, her generosity and open heart, and it's tempting to wonder how idealized a portrait she is.  But the film feels too complicated, too well-written and acted, and Cleo herself feels too human and looms too large in the film's landscape, for this criticism to entirely land.  It seems harder to admit that sometimes love isn't just.  Some people take what they can get and make do, while others take what's offered to them and don't wonder whether they've done enough to deserve it.  It can leave you feeling uneasy, watching Cleo's happiness and knowing that she deserves so much more of it, but maybe that's not a bad thing.
  
  
• A lot has been written about the film's use of visuals, particularly the long pans and tracking shots that have become Cuarón's hallmark.  In particular, attention has been paid to a sequence near the end of the film, in which Cleo and the family's grandmother, Teresa (Verónica Garcia), find themselves caught the middle of the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre, when government-backed paramilitaries attacked student protesters.  Cuarón situates his camera at the windows of the second story of a department store, tracking calmly across the violence and then returning to the terrified shoppers within the store.  This is followed by the film's most harrowing sequence, in which Cleo goes into labor, and followed by a scene with her at the beach, where the camera tracks alongside her into the sea as she battles ever-higher waves to rescue the children.
  
  As impressive as all of these sequences are, it's actually the film's quieter moments that strike me as more revolutionary, and more connected to what it's trying to say.  Roma's first scene sees the film's opening credits projected against a close up of the driveway tiles in the family home, as an unseen person, who eventually turns out to be Cleo, sweeps water over them.  As the water piles up, it reflects the sky above the driveway, and eventually a passing airplane.  The contrast between Cleo's humble circumstances and the kind of life she will probably never experience (unless one of the children she cared for becomes a world-famous director, makes a movie in homage to her, and flies her to the premiere) is obvious, but to me what's important about this sequence is the long wait until we get to see the airplane.  It's almost disquieting how long the film makes you wait for anything to focus on in this shot (the audience in my screening seemed positively broken by it) but it also feels like part of the point.  Cleo's life is ruled by mundane, tedious tasks, and the film is going to immerse us in them.
  
  The next sequence follows Cleo into the house, where she collects the laundry from the family's bedrooms.  The camera follows her for a while, but eventually it situates itself in the middle of the house and makes a 360-degree turn around it.  This not only establishes the film's primary setting--though Cleo leaves the house frequently, for movies with her friends, on vacations with the family, and on her own trip to confront the father of her child, the house is at the core of the film's story--it establishes the confines of Cleo's life.  The driveway that she cleans in the film's opening moments is an image that the film returns to again and again, as people leave the house or enter it.  Later in the movie, we see Cleo clean the driveway again, after Sofia upbraids her for letting the family dog's turds pile up in it.  But every time we see the driveway again after that scene, it's once again littered with excrement.  Because, well, dogs poop.  No matter how many times Cleo cleans the driveway, it'll always get dirty again.
  
  Which seems to me like the core message of the film's visuals.  Cleo keeps moving in circles.  She cleans the driveway and then it gets soiled again.  She collects the laundry and then it piles up once more.  Even the baby she conceives at the beginning of the movie comes to nothing.  For all the film's forays into striking locations and exciting visual tricks, it's these circles, the repeated return of the camera to where it started, that seem to me to be the most important point it's making.  The film's final shot tracks Cleo as she climbs the steps to the roof of the house to do the laundry.  It's an uplifting image, gazing up at the clear sky that in the opening credits, we saw reflected on the ground.  But doing the laundry is also how Cleo started the film.  For all the upheavals she's experienced, she's still in exactly the same place.
  
  
• It's getting a lot less attention than the visuals, but the film's sound design is also worth highlighting.  And frankly, just the fact that I'm saying this should already tell you something, because if I'm borderline illiterate when it comes to talking about film visuals, I often don't even notice the sound in films (or rather, I notice it, but not in a way that consciously observes the work that went into it and the artistic choices that contribute to the work's effect).  But Roma is a rare case where a film's use of sound registers and enhances the experience of the movie.  The film has no score, and the only sounds in it are diegetic music, ambient nature noises, background conversation, and the regular noises of city life.  While the camera often remains fixed or pans back and forth across a room, the soundscape of the film works overtime to let you what's happening off-screen, in the next room, or outside the house.  The work that the sound designers do to create an aural landscape that immerses you in the setting is brilliant, and makes you feel as if you're in the movie, standing next to the characters and participating in their lives.
  
  The sound work is, in fact, the main reason why I think the "watch in a movie theater" argument has merit.  Many people have a big TV to watch Netflix on, but few of us have a surround sound system at home, and the experience of watching Roma is absolutely enhanced by the way the film's soundtrack creeps up around you.
  
  
• I've found it fascinating how some of the reviews of the film have leaped directly to reading it as an autobiographical journey through Cuarón's early growth as an artist.  It's not that this isn't an obvious aspect of the film.  Multiple lists have been made of the way that it references Cuarón's filmography (most obviously, a scene in which Cleo accompanies the children to a movie that features astronauts floating towards one another in space).  But it's telling that reviewers can look at a movie about a poor, Native, female domestic worker and see a potted artistic history of their favorite filmmaker.  Particularly since Cuarón himself doesn't make this mistake.  As much of himself and his career as he puts in Roma, it's very clear that he knows it is Cleo's movie.  In fact, while many reviewers have called the film autobiographical, it's notable that Cuarón himself is effectively absent from the movie.  We know that he's one of the children, but there's no way of telling which one.  And while the children are as well-written as any other character in the film, behaving in a believable mix of adorable and bratty, there's never a moment where the film highlights any of them, or gives us any indication that they're going to grow up to become artists.
  
  There are still questions you could ask about the way Cuarón centers the film on Cleo--the fact that he's telling her story through his own recollection of events could certainly be taken as appropriative, especially given how sensitive some of the material he's depicting is.  But there's never any question that the film is about Cleo, which is one of the many reasons that I was so won over by it.
  
  
• Another thing that's remarkable about Roma is how, for such a personal film that is locked into such a limited point of view, it manages to be fiercely political.  This is seen, most obviously, in the Corpus Christi massacre scene, but signs of political turmoil in 70s Mexico abound throughout the film.  Cleo is told about fellow Native villagers whose lands have been confiscated.  Military parades down the family's quiet residential street punctuate the film's events.  There's even an earthquake that raises questions about the city's preparedness for such a disaster.  I'm sure that, for people who know more about Mexico's history, there are more references that went over my head, but even to an outsider like myself it's remarkable how good Cuarón's script is at conveying a great deal of information about its setting in very few words, and with images seemingly focused on the intensely personal.  When Cleo goes to visit Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), the father of her child, he off-handedly mentions that his martial arts group is being trained by an American.  When he later turns up killing students in the Corpus Christi massacre, it doesn't take much to connect the dots.  The result is a film that effortlessly draws connections between the personal and the political, which seems only appropriate for a story about a Native woman making her way in an enclave of the elite.

Five Comments on Gravity

It's hard to imagine two films that are more different than Upstream Color and Gravity, but in one sense at least they ping me the same way--they both seem like films about which it would be a waste of time to try to write a conventional review.  Or at least, the way I write reviews, focusing on plot, character, and theme.  Like Upstream Color, Gravity is a film whose power lies elsewhere, in its visuals and design, and in the way it reaches directly for emotions like fear and anxiety.  That's not to say that there haven't been interesting reviews of the film (I'm fond of this one, by Wai Chee Dimock at The Los Angeles Review of Books), but as I did with Upstream Color, it seems to make more sense to gather my stray observations about the film rather than write a proper review.

• Watching the film, I was reminded of an essay I read in 2009, by a reviewer who was trying to explain away negative reactions to James Cameron's Avatar by, essentially, claiming that people who didn't like the film had been watching it wrong.  Avatar, his argument went, was a plotless movie.  To complain about its dull story, thin characters, and self-contradictory message was to miss the point, which was the film's visual spectacle and immersive cinematic experience.  This is, obviously, a ridiculous argument to make about Avatar, but it suits Gravity to a T.  Not because Gravity's visual spectacle outweighs the thinness of its plot and characters--that's a determination that every viewer has to make for themselves--but because it lacks the kind of dumb, insistent, offensive plotting with which Avatar weighs down its own stunning visuals.  Gravity is simple enough to describe in a single sentence--two astronauts, played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, are stranded in orbit when a debris storm destroys their shuttle--and yet that description tells you virtually nothing about the film.  Its script is essentially one drawn out, constantly worsening disaster scenario, whose power is rooted in the judiciousness with which director Alfonso Cuarón and his son and co-writer Jonás pace the film's moments of tension and relief, the way that they allow us to breathe when the astronauts appear to have been saved, only to reveal yet another complication--low oxygen, equipment malfunctions, that same cloud of debris coming back around the Earth to pummel them again--that worsens their already precarious situation.  It's a brilliant bit of disaster writing, but it's not, strictly speaking, a plot, and Gravity works because of the way it realizes that disaster--and the astronauts' experience of being helpless and alone in orbit--in such an immersive, visceral fashion.
  
  Which makes the script's attempts to invent an emotional arc for Bullock's character seem more than a little like a failure of nerve.  For the most part, Bullock and Clooney don't really have personalities to play.  Their characters embody the traits for which the actors have become known--his twinkling charm, her approachable warmth--and don't develop any further (to the extent that though it's easy to mentally replace Clooney with Robert Downey Jr., the actor originally attached to the male role, it's hard to imagine Gravity with Angelina Jolie, whose public persona is very different from Bullock's, playing the female part).  They are both--and particularly Bullock, who spends the latter two thirds of the movie on her own after Clooney's character sacrifices himself to save her--audience identification figures, only slightly more rounded than the first person player character in a video game.  And like that figure, they exist mainly as an every-person through whom the audience can project themselves through, and into the film's nerve-wracking scenario. 
  
  So when Gravity tries to give Bullock an emotional arc, there's little for the actress to hang it on.  I was pleased, at first, when the film revealed that Bullock's character had lost a daughter and had no other family--it seemed like a rejection of the too-common assumption, in disaster stories, that characters need a reason to want to survive.  In its final third, however, Gravity interweaves Bullock's predicament with her grief--choosing to make one last stab at returning to Earth is also a choice to relinquish the numbness she sank into after her daughter's death and live again.  It's not a point that the film belabors, but it also feels unnecessary and, given how thin the character is, not very well-realized--the pain of losing a child, and the difficulty of choosing to go on after that loss, can't be captured in a few trite lines of dialogue, and Bullock isn't the actress who can elevate that thin material to make her character's return to life truly resonant.  It's not deal-breaker for me, but I think that I would have been very happy with Gravity as a perfectly-realized disaster piece with gorgeous visuals and minimal character work.
  
  
• Does Gravity need Bullock's character to be a woman?  As I've said, Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone is the film's main audience identification figure, and Sady Doyle has written an excellent piece about the importance of casting a woman in such a role, especially in a technology- and jargon-heavy, and thus supposedly male-oriented, film like Gravity.  The film's success, Doyle argues, puts the lie to the claim that men can't identify with female heroines the way women habitually do with male heroes.  Doyle's point is important (and it remains valid despite he caveats I'm about to pile on it), but underpinning it is the assumption that Gravity would be exactly the same movie if Stone were played by a man, which I don't think is true.  In interviews, Cuarón has said that he and his son envisioned the film's lead as a woman because they wanted "to strip it from heroists," a non-word that has caused some flurry of interpretation and consternation.  But to me Cuaron's meaning seems obvious from the film itself--he needed Stone to be a woman because she is defined, first and foremost, by her vulnerability.
  
  In the film's first third, Stone is frantic, just on the verge of panic.  Her relationship with Clooney's Matt Kowalski, the mission commander, is one of dependence.  In the film's opening moments, before the debris appears, he's helping her complete a technical assignment while she shakes off nausea.  Later, after she's been flung away from the shuttle, he calmly, even cheerfully talks her through the procedures she needs to follow to help him find her.  After they're reunited (a scene in which Stone clings to Kowalski, and, when he tells her that he's about to pay out the line with which they're tethered so that he can use his maneuvering jets, begs him not to) Kowalski quite clearly manages Stone, acting alternately paternal and lightly flirtatious, distracting her with jokes, questions about her life, and most of all an insouciant, untroubled tone that never wavers, even when he launches himself into space. 
  
  To be clear, Stone's panicked reaction is entirely normal and reasonable, regardless of her gender, as is the fact that Kowalski feels the need to handle her--especially given that, as we learn at the beginning of the film, Stone is a rookie astronaut on her first mission, who's only had six months of training (her panic actually makes more sense than her sudden burst of competence and devil-may-care spirit in the film's final sequence).  But it's hard to imagine a movie--and certainly not a big-budget Hollywood movie--giving those kinds of character beats to a male character, and it is even more difficult to imagine the kind of dynamic that develops between Stone and Kowalski being replicated if their genders were reversed, or if they were both men (at least, not without making the Stone character significantly younger than Kowalski, while Clooney and Bullock are only a few years apart in age).  Doyle is right that Gravity is unusual in being a blockbuster film mostly carried by a female lead, but Stone herself isn't so unusual a figure--when it comes to suffering beautifully, being battered about by circumstances, and powering through with pluck and determination, modern pop culture tends to reach for women (for a recent example, look at the current season of Homeland, and the pummeling that it has dealt to Carrie Mathison).  It will be interesting, for example, to compare Gravity to J.C. Chandor's forthcoming film All is Lost, which has a very similar premise, but whose sole survivor character is an older man played by Robert Redford.  Already from the trailers it seems that Redford's character's competence is never in as much doubt as Stone's, and I would be surprised if his performance turns out to be as rooted in vulnerability and fear as Bullock's is.
  
  That's not to say, however, that Gravity salivates over Stone's suffering, or expects us to pity her.  However unbelievable, her arc over the course of the movie is one of growing competence, and her final actions to get herself back to Earth are just on the verge of cartoonish heroism.  Even more importantly, the way that Cuarón shoots Bullock seems designed to showcase her strength even before she realizes it herself.  Bullock is a tall, imposing woman, and though she spends most of the movie swaddled in bulky spacesuits, when she emerges from them she looks anything but vulnerable.  More than a few jokes have been made about the underwear Stone reveals when she shucks off her spacesuit (including the observation that it leaves little room for the adult diaper she ought to have been wearing), but to me the operative mood of that scene isn't titillation, but awe.  When she reveals herself as a body, rather than just a head floating in a suit she can barely control, Stone suddenly seems powerful, all strong arms and muscly runner's legs.  Those legs serve her in good stead in the film's final disaster, when her landing pod's floats malfunction and it sinks into the water, forcing Stone to swim against the gush of water filling the pod and out of her dead-weight spacesuit.  It's not at all believable that someone who has spent a week in microgravity (and the last ninety minutes scrambling from one temporary haven to another and nearly dying from oxygen deprivation) could make that swim, but Bullock's physicality sells it.  When she crawls, and then walks, onto a shore in the film's final moments, the camera hugs Stone close, shooting her from below as she rises to her feet, and then climbing up her body.  It's a shot that could easily have seemed prurient, but instead it reaffirms Stone's strength--she looks like a giant, as powerful and tangible on the earth as she was vulnerable and ephemeral in space.
  
  
• It's disappointing to have to say this, but even in a film in which only three actors appear on screen (with two others present as voices, and another two bodies which may or may not have been modeled on actual actors) it's still the non-white guy--another member of the shuttle crew named Shariff (Phaldut Sharma)--who dies first, taking a piece of debris to the head in the film's opening disaster scene.
  
  
• As much as it is an immersive, absorbing film, I think that for most people watching Gravity there will also have been a small voice piping up throughout it, wondering: how did they do that?  Is that bit animated or real?  How was this effect achieved?  How much of this film was created on a set, and how much in a computer?  After learning some more about the film's absurdly complicated creation process--which Cuaron describes as combining the worst challenges of live shoots and computer animation--what struck me was that Bullock's performance, which is being praised to the level that she's considered a safe bet for an Oscar nomination, is a construct, as much the work of animators and technicians as it is hers.  There's a degree to which this is true about any performance, but when you read about how Ryan Stone was created it seems almost like a metaphor for this collaborative process.  Bullock's movements in some scenes had to be minutely choreographed well before the shoot, because the objects she'd be interacting with would only exist in a computer.  For the scenes in which Stone floats in zero G aboard various space stations, Bullock was suspended in a rig, her limbs manipulated by a team of professional puppeteers.  I was reminded of a similar (and, arguably, much better) constructed performance, by Andy Serkis as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films, which like Bullock's was the product of both an actor and a team of technicians.  There's obviously more than one reason why Serkis was never considered for an Oscar while Bullock is almost certain to be nominated for one--he's a lower profile actor, the campaign to get him nominated was a fan-driven affair and not, as far as I know, seriously pursued by the studio, Gollum is more obviously a construct than Stone--but I wonder if we haven't also reached a point where this kind of marriage of craft and technology is being taken seriously, and what that bodes for the future, as computer animation becomes a more integral component of filmmaking.
  
  
• Is Gravity science fiction?  There's nothing counterfactual or futuristic about the film's technology, and its premise is even based on a real theorized worst case scenario.  Nevertheless, it's been embraced by fans as being at least SF-adjacent, simply for portraying space exploration and for straining for some degree of accuracy in doing so (though as astrophysicists and actual astronauts have pointed out, the film takes many liberties with the realities of life in space).  But I wonder whether Gravity's SFnal credentials don't hail from a different direction, one that old-school genre and space fans might be more suspicious of.  Gravity fits right into a sub-genre that has been slowly emerging over the last decade, of films nominally focused on space exploration and life in space, but which inevitably turn into horror stories.  Recent release Europa Report has been praised for the accuracy with which it depicts a mission to Jupiter's moon, but its story still revolves around the astronauts discovering something that goes bump in the night.  So, apparently, do other recent space-set films like Last Days on Mars or Stranded, and even a film with such high stakes as Danny Boyle's Sunshine felt the need to add a horror component to its story to make it palatable.  Among recent space-set movies, I think that Moon alone stands as the exception to the rule that the only stories that can be told in such an environment are about the characters being picked off one by one by evil aliens, mysterious contagions, or space madness.
  
  Gravity is slightly different--it's more a terror film than a horror film, and the danger that threatens its characters is perfectly understood and even mundane, the result of the botched destruction of an old satellite, rather than something that jumps out at them from the shadows.  Nevertheless, it is a film that works hard to justify its opening statement, that "Life in space is impossible"--and if it wasn't impossible when the film started, it certainly is by its end, which sees all major man-made objects in Earth's orbit destroyed while space exploration is rendered impossible for decades to come.  That's obviously in keeping with the conventions of disaster films, which habitually feature death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, then ask us to cheer at the survival of a few main characters regardless of how difficult (or impossible) it will be for them to rebuild.  But somehow Gravity feels different.  For a film that seems designed to appeal to space nuts and science fiction fans to, essentially, poison space without even acknowledging that it has done so seems almost too cruel.  It doesn't make the film any less exhilarating, but it does leave a bad taste spoiling the triumph of Stone's survival.