Roma, Academy Award nominee for best film, has created my own memories of childhood

I saw Oscar nominee Roma, Alfonso Cuarón, trying to take a look at the memories of his childhood in Mexico City.

When I left the theater, however, I had an intense need to look into my own.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mexican youth fought in the streets of the capital for democratic change, civil rights and freedom of expression. On October 2, 1968, the protests ended with the violent siege of Tlatelolco Plaza that left hundreds dead, but the movement ended in 1971 (the year of my birth) with El Halconazo, when paramilitaries government-trained killed protesters during a march in Mexico City.

It is at this time and the place where Rome is taking place. The film, a very personal masterpiece of storytelling and cinematography, was shown in some cinemas in October and is now broadcast on Netflix. He won the Golden Globe for Best Cinematographic Film in Foreign Language and has 10 Oscar nominations, including Netflix its net first coveted sign of Best Picture Oscars. (Read here my review of Roma in Spanish.)

Roma is based on Cuarón's childhood memories. In the film, the father leaves the family and the mother has trouble understanding his new social and practical realities. There are four children and a grandmother, but the film really talks about their servants, Cleo (a fantastic Yalitza Aparicio) and Adela (Nancy García García). They both speak Mixtec, a spoken language in central and southern Mexico. "Stop talking funny," said the youngest child to Cleo at first. "I do not understand you." This foreshadows what will happen.

Cleo is the emotional and practical problem solver: she cooks, cleans, does the dishes, sleeps the kids and lets the matriarch (an excellent Tavira Marina) let off steam at any time.

In the most heartbreaking scene of the film, we see El Halconazo through Cleo's eyes. She is pregnant and witnesses the violence in the streets of a furniture store when her water broke down and she was taken to the hospital. A receptionist asks grandmother Cleo's full name. "I do not know her full name and I do not know where she comes from," she replies crying. The transition from national turmoil to personal turmoil is one of the most intense and impactful 20 minutes of cinema I've seen in a long time.

Shared memories

For many, growing up in the Mexican middle clbad meant living in a delicate bubble. While waiting for the implosion, we lived with privileges reserved for the aristocracy, but on a more modest scale. This meant that we had housewives – housekeepers, cooks and sometimes even drivers – but they received a basic salary with no benefits, lived with us in miniature rooms, prepared dinner late at night, and got up early in the morning. next day have breakfast ready. In return for the lack of compensation, the Mexican middle clbad treats its workers "like a family".

My Cleo was Husband, my grandmother's housekeeper, a strong, light-skinned woman who had lost three fingers when she was a child in separate accidents with a pair of scissors and a firecracker. Whenever I went for a visit, she would prepare my favorite lime pie. She also prepared pozole soup, particularly exquisite, as she cleaned each grain of hominy by hand, carefully extracting its black spots. I do not remember Mari's family name, although I was able to visit her in her village at adulthood. Her house was furnished with items that she had inherited from my grandmother.

Husband was "like a family", and yet she was not there. Growing up, the phrase "like a family" has made me mad because of its inherent injustice. "They have their own family and would rather be with them," I would argue. But I do not remember how many brothers and sisters she had, her parents or where she had grown up. Roma, in many ways, reminded me of my careless forgetfulness and made me feel mortified and regretted for not having sufficiently recognized Mari.

In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Nobel laureate Octavio Paz's incisive and hard-hitting essay on what it means to be Mexican, the author describes hearing a noise at home. "Who is here?" he asks. "I was answered by the voice of a maid who had just come from her village," he writes. His answer: "No one, señor, I am." She is a person who does not want to draw attention to herself, who does what she has to do, just like Cleo of Rome.

Someone who denies another human being his right to be, writes Paz, "is also transformed into a" Person ".

Cuarón, who won the Oscar for Best Director for Gravity in 2014, and who wrote, produced, directed and even directed the cinematography for Roma, dedicated the film to Libo, his childhood nanny. In so doing, he not only recognized who she was and what she meant for him, but also reaffirmed that Libo was someone. By doing this, Cuarón is also a person.

Cuarón said that he was expecting to have the emotional maturity to make this film. This is perhaps his most personal to date. It is therefore logical that the director also takes full control of the camera instead of recruiting his usual collaborator, Emmanuel "El Chivo" Lubezki, triple winner of an Academy Award. He describes his breathtaking memories, filming in black and white: water flowing on the ground when Cleo sweeps the garage; slow planes flying in a gray sky; the family watching TV with Cleo sitting on the floor.

Rome Roma

One of the main characters of the movie is the neighborhood itself. I grew up 15 miles north of Mexico City in a suburb called Satelite. But my first job was in Colonia Roma, the neighborhood that gave the movie its name.

The film reminded me of the huge American-made cars of the era, such as the Chrysler Imperial or the Valiant Acapulco, pbading the tiny and ubiquitous Volkswagen Beetle that clutter the roads. He also mentioned the sprawling cinemas surrounded by street vendors, who sold everything from plastic toys with a strange Superman and Batman look to multicolored balloons with indistinguishable forms. But it's the neighborhood that is central to everything.

Roma is close to downtown Mexico City. Its main boulevard, Álvaro Obregón Avenue, is lined with trees in the middle of large neocolonial and Art Deco houses. Most of the old structures have been replaced by 20-storey buildings with mirrored façades. Today, the traffic between its narrow avenues is ruthless, as in the rest of the city.

Roma, the quintessence of the bourgeoisie, was beaten twice on a sinister day: September 19th. In 1985 and 2017, powerful earthquakes shook the city and La Roma was one of the most affected. areas with hundreds of multi-storey buildings in ruins. As a character, the neighborhood fits perfectly in the narrative of the growth of the middle clbad in Mexico. It is a seemingly idyllic place, both modern and European, but located in the center of a city that still struggles for its identity as an ancient Aztec capital, a hub of Spanish colonial exploits and, today epicenter of Mexican hypsterism.

Like La Roma, the Mexican middle clbad is also in conflict with identity.

In general, Mexicans of the middle clbad are convinced that we are part of the solution. Roma is home to many bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals who are close enough to power to influence, but far enough away to avoid being contaminated by rampant corruption. But our little secret is that we are also part of the status quo, especially with regard to the exploitation of others for a modest salary and dubious living conditions. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography of Mexico, of the 2.48 million domestic workers in the country, 90% are women.

While Roma is about the memories of Cuarón, it forced me to shake my head and remember my hometown, Mari and all the women who helped take care of me and my family in the course of my life. road. I'm grateful for all the memories and personal calculation, it triggered – the reason I plan to see the movie again.

First published on December 14, 2017.
Update from January 6, 2018 to 19h PT: Roma adds the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
Updated January 22 at 8:41 am Pacific Time: He adds that Roma has been nominated for the best Oscar film.

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