SHERDOG MOVIE CLUB: Week 141 - Roma

[Tufts]

The bad omens part of it didn't occur to me until I had watched the entire film and then figured out there was a theme of birth and death throughout the film. I should have definitely picked up on the foreshadowing in the maternity ward when the earthquake happened.

And when they toasted to the baby's health and a different lady slammed into Cleo from behind, and her drink smacked her in the face as she was about to have a sip.

 

[europe1]

Cloe was given the family doctor in an expensive private hospital, who was probably just about the best care you could get in the whole city. They were going to buy her a cradle. All this after Cloe was scared of being fired because of pregnancy, which I suppose was the common solution back then in similar situation. I think mom went the extra mile.

I think it's fair to say that they gave her material support. But where inconsiderate/ignorant of her emotional needs.

Mom not giving support after stillborn baby? Cloe got basically invited to be a family member.

By serving them during a vacation? I don't see that at all. Plus she only agreed when the children begged her too. Group pressure. The whole "creating a family with Cleo" part seemed entirely incidental and not something mommy even seemed cognitively aware of doing (if you can even call Cleo family since she's a maid).

What better support is there? Saying that you’re sorry?

I was thinking just being nicer and more appreciative towards her on a day-to-day basis, not ventilate on her so much. Not take her from granted and instruct the children to be more obedient towards her.

Family’s income was about to be cut probably more than half and she was still not only willing to keep employing Cloe, who’s ability to actually do a full time job was about to be seriously compromised, but to show her maybe the most volurnable moment of her life:

It is strange that we don't see them discussing or even thinking about Cleo's employment. For Sofia, an economic crisis pretty much amounted to getting a new job and getting a cheaper car. Never once do we get the nod towards cutting either Cleo or the other maid (how many can they need anyway?). Honestly, I don't think we can extrapolate that much from this considering Alfonso has chosen to ignore the subject of Cloe's job-safety entirely, despite seeming like a prescient issue considering the circumstances. But they can't have been in that dire straits.

First I get bum rushed by Bullitt68 and then trolled by you. I can't believe this subject is so touchy...

It is because you are an evil person. Filled with evil instincts. Governed by faculties so evil that the Devil himself sneers in your general direction. I never used to believe in the concept of absolute evil, thinking it only existed in myths and fairy tales. But now, because of Yotsuya's posts about Roma on the Sherdog forums, I know that evil is not only a metaphysical reality but also incarnate on earth. I can scarcely imagine what wicked opinions you have prepared regarding The Bounty. But I pray to The Almighty that I am able to resist them. Be sure that my nostrils are already palpitating in anger at the sheer wrongness of what your evil mind will be able to conjure.

I don't feel like Cleo was treated properly at any point when it came to receiving medical care. The complete lack of empathy was appalling.

I've always thought doctor's and empathy was a strange thing. You're around death and failed resuscitations every day. The worst day of ordinary people is to you just Tuesday. How do you manage to hold onto an empathic mindset in such a situation? Wouldn't the sheer quantity of misery just numb your senses?

We saw how she is the one who always put the children to to bed and woke them up. We see the sweetness of the routines that are in place with the songs she sings them and the way she rubbed their backs to wake them up in the morning. She truly loves those kids and is more of a mother and father to them than their own biological parents. I've see this a lot in India as well, children being raised by their ayas instead of their parents.

Yeah. That sure does happen. They are -- essentially -- bought to provide love in substitution. I just can't help but feel like that's something that should be criticized instead of lionized.

The mother took her for granted but I think at the end, finally realized how much she needed Cleo. The kids always openly loved her....but the love came from a place of privilege. When they arrive home at the end, the kids go upstairs and exclaim over the changes while Cleo brings in the luggage. As soon as Cleo goes upstairs, they tell her they love her and immediately ask her to make them banana milkshakes. Her love is recognized while her place in the family is reinforced.

This brings to mind discussions of what "love" even means or entails. Kids learning the love of the privileged.

It is disturbing to me how Cleo is portrayed as a cheerful, hard working woman, happy and grateful with her lot in life until she sullies herself when she got pregnant. It is the pregnancy, not the hard work, or the long hours, or the abuse from Sofia that make Cleo become quiet and unhappy. It is acknowledging that she didn't want the baby that becomes her redemption. Loosing the baby also feels like a judgy punishment for not wanting to be a mother. But who would in her position? At one point Adela brings up the fact that the army had taken away Cleo's mother's land in the village. Cleo asked What can I do? and Adela said You could visit her and Cleo says Like this indicating her pregnancy that her mother must not know about. There is minimal emotional reaction to the loss of land. There is acceptance that this is how the world works, just like there is acceptance that she must work from dawn until bedtime every single day. Cleo is happy at the end because she confesses her sin of not wanting the baby, and she is able to happily go back to how things were before she messed up. To me this is the idealized telling of a romanticized life from the eyes of a little boy who is not able to understand what Cleo's life was really like.

And also joy and acceptance in her routine. Up until she got pregnant, she seemed happy in her routine. She was always singing and finding joy in the minutiae of life. This contrasted strongly with the unhappiness that Sophi and her husband exhibited, despite their huge house and home and plethora of possessions.

We don’t really know what Cloe thinks or feels about it. Is she crying up there or is she content? Cuarón makes no claims about it. He admits, that he has no grasp what it feels like to be Cleo, but he wants the best for her.

To me, it seems like Cleo's happiness and contentedness is just a product of her life-situation. Being a maid is all she has. She has no other opportunities. She has no learning with which to analyse her situation. Cleo cannot see herself in any larger framework -- she only knows the minutia of her own life, there is little context with which to compare herself with. So she's destined to be content and happy with what she has, love the spoiled children and sing happily while doing her menial chores, since she cannot even imagine another situation to be in. She finds sollice in her routine since that all she has.

… If the movie was intended to simulate the boredom and frustration of her situation, then it succeeded. The first hour and fifteen minutes was like Apocalypse Now, but with a maid in Mexico instead of the soldiers in the Vietnam war... Ok, maybe not that slow and miserable, but It was really fucking slow.

I'd say it was more Deer Hunter-slow than Apocalypse Now slow.

They don't even let her keep the lights on after they go to sleep. That's an 16 hour workday basically, and she didn't stop the whole time. She even dresses the spoiled brats. The kids are so lazy one of them thinks he doesn't have to share the candy with his sister, it's all his because he made the effort of putting it in the freezer. Damn, that's lazy. This was long before the digital age when that kind of laziness was very uncommon.

Not sure it was uncommon. Wasn't the very reason you had maids in the first place that you could be this lazy? Not to mention just unatuned to the needs of others.

I kept hoping it would take a wild tales styled twist and she'd started poisoning them all, or shoot the dude that knocked her up and threatened her, but I knew the kid survived to write the story so...

Cleo really didn't know any other life than maidship. She had no education or no life-experience. She couldn't even ponder on the possibility of another life since she had no opportunities or learning on such matters. It makes her fate and the film very deterministic. She's destined to be a maid since that's the only door life has ever opened to her.

If someone had managed to smuggle some communist literature to her she'd have been infected immedietely and Pancho Villa'd the hell out of that place.

Besides simulating the misery of a maids life, this movie also gets into the issue of classism, a little bit. It was interesting when the kid told the story of the other boy being killed for throwing a water balloon at a soldiers jeep. The maid was the only one bothered by it. The family didn't fear the army or empathize with the citizenry the way the maid did.

The protest/riot scene was absolutely amazing. Protests in movies always look so fake and ridiculous, with small crowds. That shot must've taken some planning, just wow.

 

[MusterX]

And when they toasted to the baby's health and a different lady slammed into Cleo from behind, and her drink smacked her in the face as she was about to have a sip.

The number of signs involving that babies demise are adding up. Cleo is bumped into when trying to drink to the babies health, spilling drink all over her and causing her to drop the cup, where it shatters on the floor. The maternity ward is hit by an earthquake, which now that I'm thinking about it, focused on one baby in an incubator. Premature babies are put into incubators. This is direct foreshadowing of when Cleo went to buy a crib for the baby she sees a murder and the father of her baby points a gun in her face, causing her to go into premature labor.

 

[Bullitt68]

I don't feel like Cleo was treated properly at any point when it came to receiving medical care. The complete lack of empathy was appalling.

I've always thought doctor's and empathy was a strange thing. You're around death and failed resuscitations every day. The worst day of ordinary people is to you just Tuesday. How do you manage to hold onto an empathic mindset in such a situation? Wouldn't the sheer quantity of misery just numb your senses?

First thing I thought of was Chuck Palahniuk's autopsy story (which is really a David Sedaris story) from his JRE appearance:

I'd say it was more Deer Hunter-slow

Surely there are better ways to describe the slowness of this dud than by comparing it to a cinematic masterpiece

 

[Yotsuya]

I feel like I’d need to start mostly repeating myself to reply to this thread, so for me this is the good time to stop. It’s been a great conversation!

It is because you are an evil person. Filled with evil instincts. Governed by faculties so evil that the Devil himself sneers in your general direction. I never used to believe in the concept of absolute evil, thinking it only existed in myths and fairy tales. But now, because of Yotsuya's posts about Roma on the Sherdog forums, I know that evil is not only a metaphysical reality but also incarnate on earth. I can scarcely imagine what wicked opinions you have prepared regarding The Bounty. But I pray to The Almighty that I am able to resist them. Be sure that my nostrils are already palpitating in anger at the sheer wrongness of what your evil mind will be able to conjure.

It’s a payback for all of your Swedish priviledge. All those hundreds of years of oppressing Finns and then crushing us time after motherfucking time in hockey with that priviledged big brother attitude. You don’t have right to make comments about my Roma opinions! You made us go to the darkside. Now prepare for an eternity of enslavement.

 

[Tufts]

Roma got 10 Oscar nominations today!

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/oscar-nominations-2019-list-1203112405/

 

[Tufts]

Being poor when you are rich is not the same as being poor when you are poor. I have a friend who gets $6,000,000 after taxes from a trust every ten years, and she straight up told me she can't afford to raise her son. I guess it sucks having to share your Gucci budget with a toddler.

I'm thinking Cleo was more in charge of the house and Adela may have been the cook.

 

[Tufts]

I've always thought doctor's and empathy was a strange thing. You're around death and failed resuscitations every day. The worst day of ordinary people is to you just Tuesday. How do you manage to hold onto an empathic mindset in such a situation? Wouldn't the sheer quantity of misery just numb your senses?

True. That is why the support staff should be stepping up while the doctor focusses on being a sociopathic healer. This is why so many surgeons are actual sociopaths. It takes something I personally do not possess to cut someone open and then live with yourself after they die.

 

[Tufts]

I tapped out at "peeling the face down." Yikes. It takes a special kind of brain to do these jobs. I believe most surgeons are sociopaths. I'd never thought about pathologists. Different strokes for different folks I guess.....

 

[sickc0d3r]

I don't want to write much about this depressing movie, and most of what there is to say has been said anyway. It took me 4 sit downs to finish it--largely because my kids are actually the spawn of demons and my wife is traveling this week--and my reward for making it through was deep, penetrating sadness (I was only joking kids, you're awesome, daddy loves you!). Even the promise of some nudity turned about to be a dude jumping around with his dingaling hanging out. Also, if I never see another subtitle again I will be ok with that.

 

[JayPettryMMA]

Just finished watching this. Yeesh. How many Oscars was this nominated for? How do you say overrated in Spanish?

I'll have more thoughts when I'm not on mobile, but this was a chore to watch. Pun probably intended.

 

[Tufts]

I don't want to write much about this depressing movie, and most of what there is to say has been said anyway. It took me 4 sit downs to finish it--largely because my kids are actually the spawn of demons and my wife is traveling this week--and my reward for making it through was deep, penetrating sadness (I was only joking kids, you're awesome, daddy loves you!). Even the promise of some nudity turned about to be a dude jumping around with his dingaling hanging out. Also, if I never see another subtitle again I will be ok with that.

You're welcome!

 

[JayPettryMMA]

Given all the critical acclaim and now Oscar-bait, I expected a lot more from Roma. I think of the other films Cuaron has done over the years, and I had such...great expectations...for Roma. Boy, was I disappointed. The only thing I wasn't disappointed about was Yotsuya's spelling of her name as "Cloe" instead of "Cleo", which inspired me to now call the main character "Chloe" instead of her actual name that I was actually going to call her. So, well done.

This film should have been called "Slow Pan: The Movie." Seriously, that was about the only camera movement whatsoever, besides a little editing here and there. Speaking of editing, did we really need to see a two minute scene of her scooping up dog poo and cleaning up after it? There are so many scenes that just went on far too long, and lingered for the sake of lingering. I don't know if it was dramatic effect, but it felt like a few snips here and there would have definitely made it a more enjoyable watch. As it stands, it was nearly agonizing, the lack of anything happening for so long until...something small happened and then we're back to standing around or looking at stuff. Sure, the cinematography was solid, but that actually took away from the scenes we were supposed to care about at times. When she was at the movie theater, I wasn't watching her, I was watching one of the biggest French movies of all time. When she was pregnant and walking around in that field, I was watching everything else play out around her, even if it was completely insubstantial. As she was largely naive to anything major going on in the world around her, the rest of it stays muted. Anytime something really significant happened, it was just a brief little focus on it and time to move on and we'll never speak of it again. Take the water balloon story at the beginning. A little boy is shot by the military because he threw a water balloon, and they shrug it off and that's the end of it. When they don't care, how can we?

The story just killed me. It was just "a rough year in her life" give or take, more than an actual storyline. Sure, biographical films don't necessarily need a plot, but the moments highlighted in this were just a long line of depressing things one after the next. Those events were obviously massively important to the character, and combined with the context of the time in which this took place, it mattered a great deal, but it didn't to me. Mexico in the late 60s/early 70s isn't a time I'm particularly familiar with, and even after watching this I don't see it being incredibly noteworthy. It was the year she fell in love kind of, watched naked karate, got pregnant, lost the baby, almost let the children she takes care of drown, and then finally realizes this is all the family she needs. Ouch.

I don't know if Chloe ever felt like she was a part of the family until that last scene, and for good reason. She wasn't, at least not how the family treated her. She was their servant, and not their ward. The mother kept dumping all of her problems on Chloe (the dog poo freakout, the drunken crash) and she just took it. Not that they didn't care about her, because finding a live-in housekeeper must be tough to trust someone with that sensitive of a position, like taking care of four kids, but it felt more like an obligation than genuine affection. The "we'll take you to the doctor" and buying the crib and all that, to me it looked like something the mother (and by extension, grandmother) felt that it was something they needed to do. Maybe that's six in one, half dozen in the other, but it felt more like employee/employer relationship than something akin to Batman and Alfred. Instead, she was just the silent caretaker. Go get the oatmeal, make me some tea, clean up the place, and whatever.

A big takeaway I kept getting from this is "Men are terrible and will ruin your life, and you can't trust them with anything." All of the non-child male characters in the film were either useless or antagonists. The father lied about taking trips so he could shack up with his mistress. The boyfriend Fabien or whatever was arguably the most compelling/deepest character and he was a pure scumbag (nude Star Wars Kid scene included). The male doctor was a gossip, and when it came to him actually helping, he just bailed. Even the other boyfriend, the one in the band, was next-to-useless, saying "don't tell him I told you where he was." There were also useless men during the big party they had, and that one dude actually just stood around singing while everyone else was fighting the fire. And then we got that line from the drunken mother to tie it all together about how men are useless. What's the audience supposed to think?

And don't get me started on the Professor. By the way, what kind of name is "Latin Lover"? He's a pro wrestler, according to wikipedia, but who uses that kind of stage name in the credits of a film like this? It felt way out of place given how serious this movie was, and then to see in the credits "Latin Lover" for the Professor's name. I did actually pause the movie to see if I could do that pose he made, and it was not as complicated as he made it sound. Held it just fine with no wobbling or falling over, and so did Chloe, but she's a zen master. I'm certainly no wizard, but I was on a carpet and not uneven ground so maybe that made a difference? Nah.

I dunno, I just don't get the overwhelming praise for this film. It's not that I am a contrarian, as I enjoyed critically acclaimed pictures like The King's Speech (even though it was very self-indulgent), but Roma didn't resonate with me. I can appreciate it, but I'm not a massive fan. 6/10.

 

[Shammon]

And when they toasted to the baby's health and a different lady slammed into Cleo from behind, and her drink smacked her in the face as she was about to have a sip.

I thought that was supposed to be a good sign since her dumbass friend shouldn't have told her to drink in the first place lol.

 

[moreorless87]

If I'm understanding the charge correctly, then I'd say that it's misguided. He wasn't commenting on anything, so there's nothing that he missed or was unaware of in so commenting...because there was no comment. As my post indicates, that's a charge that's perhaps debatable but at least valid on its face (and I obviously think that it's 100% valid and a legitimate complaint to be leveled at the dull and pointless film). To say that there was a lack of self-awareness in the film, though, would seem to be an indicator of a political bias, i.e. because he didn't offer a commentary on subjugation/privilege/insert buzzword he's therefore unaware; it couldn't possibly be that he had different interests/intentions in making the film...

Almost a year late but I did finally get around to seeing it but honestly I think both of these criticisms are somewhat true and connected to each other. The film is about the situation of Cleo BUT it casts her in such a simplistic light as a suffering saint with no real ambition or character that she ends up mostly as a framing device for a very unfocused look at upper middle class Mexican society. The idea that this was some self aware crique of Curton's own childhood, nope I can't see that it all in the nature of the film which very much glories this view of her and makes very little actual criticism of the social environment around her. As you mention earlier it feels like a very tame middle class friendly Jeanne Dielman with a few rather unearnt shocking moments.

The main thing it its favour was obviously the visuals which do capture some of the environments very well but ultimately I don't think they work toward telling a cohesive story, something like Uzak for example is also full of slow arthful city shots but the atmosphere created is used vastly more effectively to tell its story IMHO.

 

[Yotsuya]

I still don’t get it why a candid, compassionate, delicate and deeply personal drama like Roma should be judged by merits of social critique. It makes zero sense to me and seems like a sad testament of the divisive, nuance blind, ”prove that your with us or you’re against us” era we’re living.