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That Roma – a foreign-language black-and-white film with no stars and released directly on Netflix – was nominated for the Best Picture at the Oscars, which suggests a fair bit of progressive for movie. But despite the superb photograph of the last Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, a deep conservatism hides beneath its surface.
Cuarón is perhaps the greatest talent from the New Mexican Cinema, the Mexican cinematographic movement born in the 1990s, which also presented Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro to the international audience. The trio, which has been crudely nicknamed "The Three Friends," has made distinctive films in Mexico before experiencing even greater success in Hollywood.
In recent years, even as the press and social media reported that the Oscars were too white, each of these three Latin American directors won Best Director and Best Picture awards.
less pretentious, more entertaining and more original of the Three Amigos. His love of long shots follows him in all the genres in which he works. There is his very explicit film on the pbadage to adulthood, Y Tu Mamá También ; his film of dystopian action, Children of Men ; and his sci-fi survival film, Gravity . Each of these beautiful genre films presents a scene of pleasant calm that suddenly turns into an intense drama, all contained in a single fluid plane. to return to Mexico and to the cinema of art and test, to tell a more personal history with Roma . His curious bedmate in this business is Netflix.
Oscar winning is a key part of Netflix's strategy to win more subscribers. He has spent more than $ 25 million on his film awards campaign this year, even before the Oscar nominations are announced. Netflix already has a reputation for producing quality television. Roma winning major Oscars would also confer considerable legitimacy on his internal film productions.
Located in Mexico City in 1970, the film tells the story of Cleo, an indigenous Mexican. , performed by Yalitza Aparicio in her first role. Cleo works as a cleaning lady in a family of the upper middle clbad, headed by the mother of the family, Sofía, played by Marina de Tavira.
The story is extremely autobiographical. The character of Cleo is inspired by a maid who worked for the Cuarón family as a child and lived in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. He has reconstructed his memories here with haunting details, even putting authentic objects from his childhood in drawers never opened on the screen. The film was shot in a house in front of Cuarón's childhood home
According to some critics, the movie's commentaries on the clbad are subtle. But I would say that it is nonexistent. The film portrays a pleasing portrait of a servile ethnic minority woman working for a middle-clbad family. The defining quality of Cleo lies in the quality of its services to its bourgeois masters. The film is not interested in the problems of its poverty or its indigenous origins. We get very little psychological information about it and there is no character development. It is described as a little more than "help". In fact, the film is very nostalgic of the master-servant relationship, recalling that of Driving Miss Daisy .
The film's strong emotions do not come from a well-told story, but intrusions into the plot designed to arouse sympathy. In one sequence, the main characters witness the Corpus Christi mbadacre – a mbadacre of student protesters during the dirty war in Mexico. He is represented in a long clbadic Cuarón catch: the bbadity of a shopping scene is interrupted by the mbadacre, which the characters see through the window. But this horrible event has no real relevance for the plot. The characters hardly react to it and this is never mentioned again.
Cuarón has of course intended to place Roma in the pantheon of neorealist cinema, a cinematographic movement born in Italy after the war. Neorealist films have sought to tell the stories of working-clbad people struggling with the harsh realities of everyday life. And Roma shares the style of the neorealist clbadics, with his black and white cinematography and his use of unknown actors. But if the composition of Cuarón's cinematography is exquisite, his eyes are detached and distant.
His position is rather privileged than supportive.
Christian Butler is a critic for enriched . Follow him on Twitter: @CPAButler
Watch the trailer for Roma below:
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