Roma (2018)

Mexico / USA, 135 minutes

Director/writer/photography: Alfonso Cuarón

Editors: Alfonso Cuarón, Adam Gough

Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta, Marco Graf, Veronica Garcia, Fernando Grediaga

Alfonso Cuarón takes a page from the playbook of Steven Soderbergh (and a few others), making his award-winning, much-celebrated picture for Netflix practically a one-man-band show, directing, writing, shooting, and editing this period piece set in early 1970s Mexico City. It starts slow, it’s a little long, and it can teeter dangerously close to pretentious, with a black & white color scheme and diegetic soundtrack (available commercially) that is composed entirely of music playing in the background on radios and TVs or at the movies. The parts of Roma that feel most obviously autobiographical are about a family plunged into media: radios, TVs, movies, full of audio strains and visual clips. In fact, Cuarón makes the most out of incidentals like what’s playing on the radio. My favorites are the jets floating complacently through the clouds of some of these scenes, aircraft noise and all. Some must have been shot near an airport because they seem to be flying relatively low, drawing perfect lines across their scenes. They are somehow fearsome and beautiful.

Roma survives any and all concerns about its intentions (except the one about Netflix, which I’ll get to below) as it patiently mounts a powerful slice-of-life tale with mild upstairs / downstairs notes, juggling the life of a middle-class family in breakdown with the life of their maid in similarly dire straits. Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is the maid and de facto nanny for the family headed up by Sofia (Marina de Tavira), her mostly absent husband Antonio, and their four kids, three boys and a girl. The youngest boy, Pepe (Marco Graf), might be 7. He is always talking about memories of his past lives.

Children of Men (2006)

USA / UK / Japan, 109 minutes

Director: Alfonso Cuaron

Writers: Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, P.D. James

Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki

Music: John Tavener

Editors: Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Rodriguez

Cast: Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Peter Mullan, Pam Ferris, P.D. James

The most surprising thing for me about this movie is that P.D. James wrote the source novel, The Children of Men, published in 1992. I know James as more of a detective fiction writer on the cozy side of things, and this dystopian future nightmare is anything but cozy. It has a terrific premise—set in 2027, after a sudden and mysterious onset of human infertility has led to no live births in nearly 20 years. James and five screenplay writers, including director Alfonso Cuaron, imagine what the future would look like in the circumstances. Set in London and the UK, it’s a pretty grim scene—bombings, terrorism, random violence, a world tearing itself apart from the inside.

Actually, it doesn’t look that different from now, or even 2006 (think Baghdad and other Iraqi cities). The sad fact is that not much is really done with the premise specifically. The first time I saw this picture I was kind of meh about the whole thing, but more recently I realized it’s better to take what’s given at face value and enjoy it as a fast-paced, gritty thriller with some notably impressive set pieces. In general it is also bold and brave about killing off characters early if it is so inclined, including characters we like and admire. But the main thing is the pell-mell pace and the ordnance going off on the regular.

Gravity (2013)

UK / USA, 91 minutes
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Writers: Alfonso Cuaron, Jonas Cuaron, George Clooney
Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Music: Steven Price
Editors: Alfonso Cuaron, Mark Sanger
Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

I see that my single favorite shot of 2013, which sent me back to see Gravity one more time while it was still in the theaters (and in 3D both times), is a well-known quantity at this point. At least, it serves as the climactic point of the looping scenelet on the DVD main menu. I'm talking, of course, about the final seconds of the 17-minute take that opens the picture, when astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) goes hurtling untethered into black space. It's when you realize that the carefully managed long take, with its slippery revolving camera, has totally communicated how vast, deep, cold, and alien it is in outer space.

I'm glad I indulged that second trip, because I must say Gravity loses a lot of mojo in the living room. It's faithful to the basic disaster movie template and with a great big tremendous finish. But it's just a little more puny like. In this movie, the two principals, Stone and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), have urgent things to do and critical places to go. A cascading disaster has killed the three others on their space mission, damaged their vessel, and cut off all communication with Earth. They continually encounter obstacles and then overcome them—it's a little bit like The Martian that way. Gravity benefits from its brevity, at just over an hour and a half, because its structure is so thuddingly repetitive. It doesn't mean you won't get caught up in it, but 90 minutes is probably about the right limit. What it lacks in originality that way, however, it makes up for with its fresh approach to outer space.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)

Mexico, 106 minutes
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Writers: Alfonso Cuaron, Carlos Cuaron
Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Editors: Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Rodriguez
Cast: Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal, Maribel Verdu, Daniel Giminez Cacho, Andres Almeida, Juan Carlos Remolina

Y Tu Mama Tambien makes its intentions evident from its first shot, a bedroom glimpsed through a doorway. On the wall is a Spanish language poster for Harold and Maude. On the bed are two nude teens, writhing and gasping in desperate jackrabbit sex. Their bodies are not perfect. They look like ordinary people. The girl, we find out, will be traveling to Europe soon. The boy is worried that she won't be faithful and she, in turn, is worried that he won't be. They make silly playful promises to one another. It neatly captures the film's charming balance of sexual charge, innocence, danger, and observational precision, and then swiftly begins to introduce more characters and sketch out the remarkable narrative engine that will drive this.

Before long we encounter the picture's one conceit, a calibrating perspective that regularly intrudes on the action, when all sound drops out for two or three seconds, and then a voiceover narration commands our attention briefly. This narrator is unnamed (Daniel Giminez Cacho, who is even uncredited in the film!). He is evidently not involved in the story but knows all the details—or at least has a version. He tells us things we need to know about the characters. He tells us trivial details about incidental matters such as the fate of a marauding band of pigs that is encountered. The effect is to give the picture the quality of a formal short story, a literary work, evoking a powerful mood. Even the fates of the pigs are poignant coming from this narrator. That sense is confirmed by the powerful ending, a memorably great last scene, last shot, last line, last moment—finished at its apex. Y Tu Mama Tambien often feels random and scattershot, a road movie times impromptu documentary times Godard madcap, handheld cameras and weird frames and action that often feels improvised. But in the end it becomes obvious how careful it has been every step of the way.