I was slow to fall fully in love in Alfonso Cuaron’s ROMA (2018), but from the very first shot, the one under the opening credits, I suspected that I eventually would.
That opening shot is of patterned floor tile. As soon as the credits end we will learn that it lines the narrow enclosed driveway of a well-to-do home in a Mexican city, that it is the domain of the unfortunate family dog who is never walked elsewhere or allowed in the house, and that despite daily washing it is the rest of the time a minefield of dog shit. (You can tell what time of day it is by how many turds litter the space.) None of this do we know yet. No, we are just looking down on the floor tile, a civilized pattern.
Then it is inundated, from somewhere, with a wave of soapy water. As it clears we see the reflection of a square patch of light, which as it clears, is revealed to us as a space formed by the junction of rooftops, forming an atrium. The family drama, we gather immediately, will be largely enclosed within this space, and so it shall be, though it ventures many other places. The reflection also captures a faraway jet crossing that sky, and we immediately sense what the shot is telling us, that from here there will be glimpses of a grander outside world, but still, the focus here is intimate, what is visible within this atrium.
More waves of soapy water come, one after another, blurring that patch of sky that returns to clarity between inundations, and this tells us still more — that we are about to see a film driven in part by the passage of time. (We have no way of knowing that the climax is driven by ocean waves, an echo two hours away, but in retrospect this works, too.)
The movie has so far done nothing but point its camera at the ground, while the credits play, and yes, it has told us everything.
I did not fall in love with the film for almost an hour. I knew I was watching a work of art with this shot, I knew I was watching something beautiful within five minutes, I knew I was watching something extraordinary when, not much later, that driveway is used by a luxury car that, in this narrow space, is a bitch and a half to park. It cannot enter without great care and backtracking and damage to the walls and the car. It doesn’t belong there, and this, too, is a detail that tells us everything.
I became engaged with the movie when the protagonist, the family maid, goes to a movie, her drama in the foreground while an inane military farce plays in the background; and I realized I was watching an all-out masterpiece later on, on a trip to a department store.
Movie buffs love to praise elaborate camera setpieces where extended business takes place all in one shot, and I must report that this film has several, a couple of them action setpieces that would not be out of place in a completely different film. The department store is one; a hospital is another; and that beach, my god, that beach, is a third. The technical requirements in all three must have been staggering. But in all three they are put to the service of a story not about some living-weapon superspy, laying out wave after wave of enemy agents, coming at her in waves; but about one woman living a year in her life, whose personal drama is one small part of another, that affects the lives of the family employing her. They could have been filmed much more conventionally but they would not have been one tenth as powerful. That they are filmed with genius, is more than we had the right to expect. This is a great film, and yes (sigh) I understand why I have been urged to see it on a big screen, which turned out to not be in the cards. I saw it at home. But if you can see it theatrically, please do. And give it the time it deserves.
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