The film is set in Mexico City during 1970–71, the tail end of both the so-called Mexican economic miracle (1940–60) and the beginning of the end of the political domination of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed Mexico for seventy-one years. Within Mexican society and its film world, however, the movie’s reception has been distinctive, both more celebratory and more bitingly critical, reflecting the film’s intimate relationship with the nation’s political history. Roma marks Cuarón’s return to his roots in Mexico City as an empowered global filmmaker.
Throughout his career, Cuarón’s work, according to Dolores Tierney, both “conforms to and frustrates a number of expectations of the Hollywood genre most resemble.” 6 In Y tu mamá también, for instance, he revisits both the teen film and the road movie, but uses realist camerawork (long takes, handheld camera, critical voice-over narrative) to situate the film’s gender and sexual politics in the context of Mexico’s political system, and within the neocolonial race and class relations that inform the film’s progressive politics. Today, Cuarón, del Toro, and Iñárritu, these three güeritos (light-skinned Mexicans), have become leading players in world cinema, all working between the national and transnational worlds of cinema.
#Miguel parra injustice 2 plus#
While training at Latin America’s oldest film school, the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC) in Mexico City, he began working with his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki as well as his tight band of cohorts Carlos Marcovich and Guillermo del Toro, plus the non-CUEC Alejandro González Iñárritu. While Roma is undoubtedly Cuarón’s most personal film-semiautobiographical, very specific about time and space, period and neighborhood and nation-Cuarón’s audience is global, as befits a transnational director whose hit films have included such disparate non-Mexican-based films as Gravity (2013), Children of Men (2006), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). I wish I could calculate those things.” 4 I didn’t calculate that people would find. But it’s been a really moving, strange process, finding the way people are responding. Cuarón confessed: “I said it was going to be a film that nobody would see and then moving on. No one, not even its director, anticipated the kind of response Roma has produced. Roma‘s profuse reception by the press and on social networks, as well as its adoption by the Mexican women’s rights non-profit Fondo Semillas in organizing for the rights of domestic workers in the United States, Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia through Mexico’s Fondo Semillas, proves its global reach.
The film’s depiction of domestic work as racialized servitude lies at the center of these debates. 2 The different ways of perceiving its representation of Mexican history, and race and class relations, have generated debates about racism, privilege, power, empathy, and compassion. However, the film has also been associated with controversy from the beginning: first, because of its launch on Netflix-a decision that kept the film out of Cannes due to the festival’s new rule (continued for the 2019 edition) banning from competition any films without a theatrical release in France and second, because of an escalating critique of its representation of Cleo, the family’s live-in maid/nanny.
1 Hailed as a masterpiece upon winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, it continued to create buzz all through the fall and winter of 2018–19 up to Alfonso Cuarón’s consecration at the Oscars. From Film Quarterly, Summer 2019, Volume 72, Number 4
0 kommentar(er)
