2018 drama, dir. Alfonso Cuarón; Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira: IMDb /
allmovie. A year in the
life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the 1970s, as mostly
seen through the eyes of their maid.
Well, yes. It's no eight hour unsubtitled unedited tone poem, but
this was a very hard watch for me, because Cuarón has made it – and I
have to assume this is deliberate, the man's competent if not always
to my taste – largely without plot or character.
They're not completely lacking. Dad, a doctor, spends a lot of time
away from home, is revealed to be having an affair, and eventually
moves out of the house. Cleo, the maid, discovers she's pregnant; her
boyfriend vanishes, and when she tracks him down threatens to kill
her; they meet again while he's killing students as part of a
paramilitary group, but he doesn't kill her; she loses the baby. But
we get very little impression of what these people are like – Cleo in
particular, whom the camera follows most of the time, doesn't seem to
have any friends or anyone else to whom she could express herself
emotionally, and apart from one emotional scene when she admits that
she didn't particularly want the baby in the first place we don't
learn much about what she wants. She's a character with very little
agency, and the film is not about her taking agency, or even about her
realising that she doesn't have it; it's just about observing.
We're told externally that the film was largely inspired by Cuarón's
childhood, to the extent of being largely shot in a house across the
road from the one he grew up in. But this information is not in the
film and a film has to stand on its own merits. (And it's Cleo who's
the viewpoint character, rather than one of the children of the
house.)
Yalitza Aparicio is great as Cleo, but she doesn't have a lot to do.
The doctors and nurses in the miscarriage sequence are actual doctors
and nurses moonlighting, so while I'm glad that unlike most such it
looks realistic, I can't really give them credit for good acting.
There are lots of mundane conversations, long silences, close-ups of
mundane objects, if you really reach for it symbolism of water as a
cleaning force and fire as a destroying one. But that's about it.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.