DOMESTIC LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE

FILMMAKER DELICATELY TOUCHES ON THE DAILY COMPLEXITIES OF LIFE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The semi auto biographical historical drama Roma (2018) documents the daily life of a domestic house worker during the turbulent 1971 student protests in Mexico.

The foreign film by Oscar winning director and writer Alfonso Cuaron is definitely not a Hollywood film with the pop and zing of American cultural fantasy.

Cuaron creates an artistic independent film that chronicles how the daily life of the middle class goes on almost untouched by  the civil unrest and the dirty war waged by the government on the protesters.

Yalitza Aparicio gets cast to portray a native Mexican as a domestic worker in the upper middle class suburb Colonial Roma. Aparacio received an Oscar nomination for the leading role.

The domestic worker is accepted into the Hispanic family but she is always on duty as a house servant and child care provider.

Cuaron also has Aparicio perform in a second narrative about her personal struggles to find life outside the employment situation. This individual narrative intertwines with the main narrative of the middle class family.

Marina de Tavira plays the family matriarch. Tavira’s character has a professional career and relies on a domestic worker to keep the household together but all her efforts fail to bare fruit. Tavira received an Oscar nomination for her supporting role.

Tavira’s performance shows how the mother of the children also has a private narrative.

Cuaron cleverly intertwines all three life streams into a final conclusion, as well as his own personal story to write the history of the characters.

The Oscar winning director also includes a self reflective scene that touches on his film making career by showing two astronauts space walking.

Cuaron won best director Oscar for the film Gravity (2013), starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney and Ed Harris, about astronauts surviving lost in space. The film won seven Oscars in total at the 2014 Oscar award ceremony.

Roma documents 1971 with authentic cars and the virtual absence of even low tech machines compared to even the most modest of households today. The ever present Volkswagen Beetle, which was manufactured in Mexico for the North American markets, was put beside the big American import car that is too wide for the garage and the city streets.

The family eventually settles for something quite different.

The difficulty in realistically portraying the drabness of the daily life of a domestic worker is made somewhat more palatable with artful scenes and intriguing film editing.

The house family also goes through a crisis as the matriarch shows flashes of rage, as do other characters seemingly personifying the national crisis going on in the deep background.

Cuaron shows how both the individual and the family tragedies within a community of chaos often springs from a lack of common sense.

Cuaron’s script uses symbolic imagery such as a backyard forest fire scene that includes singing during the fire brigade to add an extra layer of complexity to the linear narratives, instead of the use of flashbacks and intersecting narratives.

Roma also tackles several social justice issues at the same time. The film oscillates between the city and the country to highlight the pressures imposed on the individual by the urbanization of rural economies.

The Oscar winning director shows how every aspect of life in Mexico is fraught with risks often caused by human recklessness.

The film day is only occasionally impeded by acts of God.

Roma is a better than good foreign film, but a film that would not necessarily fit with the most intellectual of Hollywood art films.

Cuaron’s choice of black and white film over colour creates a unique atmosphere for a historical drama piece. The finish also sets the Mexican culture apart from the more modern and consumer oriented Western cultures during the time period.

The tungsten quality of the finish distinguishes Roma from the independent art house films produced in Europe during an earlier era of innovation that used dark shadows against glaring street lights at night and natural sunlight during the day.

The aesthetic quality is different but not necessarily better or worse.

Roma is a Netflix Original Movie .