Roma (2018)

A friend of my family warned that he found this deathly boring. This is someone who usually favors movies about ordinary people in ordinary situations. Then again, he also really liked The Favourite, which I didn't. I figured I'd tune in to Roma if only because it's one of the top contenders for Best Picture. If it bored me too, at least I was streaming at home, so I wouldn't feel bad about discontinuing the viewing.

The title refers to a Mexico City neighborhood. Set there in the early '70s, the story, despite an R rating, is based mostly on writer-director's Alfonso Cuarón's personal childhood memories. It follows Cleo, a maid at a house that includes four children, their parents (albeit on the verge of a breakup), their grandma, second maid Adela, and a dog. Things start happening for Cleo when she gets pregnant -- and her boyfriend disappears right after hearing so.

I could tell just from the sparse summaries on Netflix and IMDb why someone might find this dull. As I said last month, adherence to realism can be bad for a semblance of overarching plot. The choice of monochrome doesn't help for mass visual interest. And while I generally champion Cuarón's signature use of tracking shots, some of them -- not least the opening -- document plodding, unimportant events that do nothing to advance characterization, perhaps deliberately aiming for ennui for the sake of "true" art. (That would also explain the occasional focus on dog excrement in inconvenient places, which I don't attribute to laziness on the maids' part.)

Fortunately for me, whenever there was dialog, I could perk up as a linguist. Not only do I like Spanish, but Cleo and Adela often communicate in a Mixtec language new to me, set off from the other subtitles by brackets. They tend to switch languages between sentences, like in India.

I had been wondering how the dynamic between Cleo and the family would go. Thankfully, it's rather friendly in both directions, almost to the point of equality. Cleo fears losing her job over the pregnancy, but that doesn't even cross her employer's mind. The father's not so respectful to her, but he doesn't seem to respect anybody.

About halfway through, I stopped for the night and picked up again days later. There wasn't much to remember, but I'm relieved to report that there are far more emotional and engaging occurrences in the last act, including a historical violent incident. It gets tragic, all right, tho not as tragic as it could have been.

I'm impressed at how far Cuarón went for authenticity. Like Jean-Luc Godard on Breathless, he would withhold the script as long as possible in order to surprise the actors; unlike Godard, he also gave them conflicting directions to confuse them as appropriate. And the medical personnel are real ones.

What got off to an unpromising start gets better the more I think about it. Roma's not my favorite nominee, but I'll gladly root for it against The Favourite.