Hey everyone, long time no talk. Welcome back to Alex’s Foreign Foray. With university coming back around I had to axe a few of my commitments here on the site and unfortunately, that meant never finishing the last planned episode of the Foray. Regardless, I’m back (temporarily) because I just couldn’t wait to talk about Netflix’s new film from Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón, entitled Roma.

If you’re new to the series, you can find out what it’s all about here.

Now, this isn’t the start of another season of the Foray (yet), but simply a special episode where I’m going to rave about one of the best films to come out all year. The review will be spoiler-free, but Roma is available now with a Netflix subscription so I highly recommend checking it out before we dive into things.

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Inspired by the life of Cuarón’s family servant, Libo, Roma follows Cleo, a maid working in for a high-class family in the heart of Mexico City. It uses expert cinematography and an ultra-realistic cast to depict the intimate natures of human life. It is marvellous; one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Roma excels most in its intimacy, and that is primarily what I will be choosing to highlight in my review.

Cuarón’s auteurist vision is on full display in Roma, more so than any of his previous films, due to a large number of roles he played in the film’s production. As Roma’s director, writer, producer, cinematographer, and editor, it’s definitely easy to see that Cuarón had full control over the film and was able to tell his personal story in its most raw and meaningful way.

This intimacy is found most clearly through the film’s cinematography. Extended takes have always been Cuarón’s forte, and in Roma, they are used to explore the long and monotonous, yet important, tasks that Cleo performs every day. There’s a shot that simply rotates around as Cleo turns off the house’s lights before heading to bed that is fantastic, casually following her routine and exploring her day-to-day activities.

There’s also a more violent moment that takes place during a critical event in early 70’s Mexico that I won’t directly spoil, yet I will say that the transition between normal life and frightening violence is so starkly emotionless and brutally devoid of anything that could keep us clinging to safety. The long take that occurs here is ridiculously impressive, shocking the audience and making their hearts race; a moment of absolute chaos in an otherwise mundane film. Wonderful stuff.

Another way that Cuarón creates a sense of intimacy is through his characters and their actors. In her first ever film role, Yalitza Aparicio delivers a powerhouse of a performance, one that even some of the most seasoned actors only dream of performing. Her turn as Cleo is startlingly realistic and emotionally sound, leading the film to feel not like a work of fiction but in a documentary sense. It feels like a real world, inhabited by real people. Cleo doesn’t for a minute feel like a character being portrayed by an actor.

It all builds up to this neorealism approach of something like Bicycle Thieves where, honestly, I can see some inspiration, especially in the cinematography and in its characters. This world just feels so lifelike, as does the characters living in it. I talked about Cleo, but not about the supporting roles, all of which have the same feeling. Often in films, child actors are awful and can pull me out of the movie. Not in Roma. In Roma, the child actors feel like real children, as do the adults, who live their day-to-day lives and act like their real-life counterparts would. I think it’s a perk of casting people relatively unknown, at least to me and to “Western” audiences: there’s a certain disconnect that occurs when a recognizable actor plays a role like this (see: Armie Hammer in last year’s Call Me By Your Name) that may not totally ruin a movie, but certainly adds a layer of “Hollywoodizing” to it. There’s none of that in Roma, it instead feels, again, almost like an Italian neorealism film: one with non-actors playing essentially themselves in a believable and lifelike world.

At the end of it all, that’s where Roma doesn’t just shine, it absolutely excels. Through its intimate cinematography and wildly lifelike characters, Cuarón creates a beautifully breathing world that, while sometimes darkly emotional and brutally devastating, is immensely wonderful and loving. Similarly to last year’s Call Me By Your Name, we are merely a fly-on-the-wall in Cuarón’s world, observing the seemingly real actions of seemingly real people, marvelling in their lives, through the good times and the bad. I want to talk more about it, but I shouldn’t. It’s one of those film’s that you simply need to experience on the biggest screen possible. I’ve barely scratched the surface, watch this film. Roma gets my highest possible recommendations.

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Roma Overall – 10 out of 10

Just watch it, man, it’s free with your Netflix subscription.

In the meantime before this starts up again (if it ever does) or before I get back to regularly reviewing, you can check out me and my good friend Garrett (of Films from the Basement fame) on our new podcast, the Digital Drive-In, the second season of which starts up this week with the Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles!