I spent time in Mexico City, and moved around a few houses. Each one came with a housekeeper, a woman either young or old - always with a family she was supported, or extended family. I came to love them too, quickly - in the same kind of relationship Cuarón portrayed in Roma - of the one with money who treated them well but wished there was a more equitable way of living together. It's a sad kind of thing, in one way I am offering employment and in another way I am acting in the class system I hate so much.
I grew up in South America, one parent Scandinavian and the other local. We had a housekeeper/nanny the same way in Roma. My Mother was adamant on having the nanny sit with us for every meal, all together. I was a kid back then so I didn't understand why my friends would find it weird when they ate dinner with us.
It is a cultural thing that is probably left over from the colonization era. Things will change but it takes time.
A close friend of mine lived in Mexico for many years. I would visit him occasionally and spend the odd week or two with him. I got to know his home help.
He being an American of generally liberal persuasion tried, as your family did, to treat the cook and gardener as 'equals'.
Over time that changed though. One day the maid sat him down and politely explained that it was sort of insulting to be treated too familiar in this context. She was speaking of the gardener and said, "What you are doing makes him feel very uncomfortable". She explained, "the old man there is kneeling in your garden pulling weeds 8 hours a day, and you come home...breeze in in your 50K auto and ask him if he wants to share a beer with you..."
He realized she was right. These people were not "passionate about their career", in fact there was no career, nor even the semblance of it. They were just doing whatever possible work they could do to earn enough money to keep food on their families table. Treating them too familiar, or even implying they shared lots of things in common, was sort of demeaning.
In the end, he wound up treating them very formally. "Sr Veracruz" "Sra Sanchez" etc...always keeping a sort of respectful distance between them. Posting work schedules, etc and generally treating them like employees.
I'm not at all against what you said, nor implying you guys didn't do what was right, simply showing there are more than one interpretation of such situations.
to do that you have to go down to their level. if you spend your free time in the garden working just as hard, then you can sit down and share the refreshments together. same goes for housework.
in china, nanny's are generally relatives. the grandparents, an aunt or a cousin. so they are part of the family. they are there because they are genuinely needed to share the work, there is no class difference. only when relatives are not available, someone else is hired, but their status is not much different.
> It is a cultural thing that is probably left over from the colonization era. Things will change but it takes time.
Assuming you are paying a fair salary, other cultures/countries don't have a housekeeper (even as a part-time work) because they cannot afford one not because it is an ethical or moral thing. In general, families with children need a lot of extra help when parents work.
While living in Brazil, I found an interesting version of this: Brazil's law allow (or at least used to) people to retire very early, because retirement is based on years of contribution and a lot of people start working at the age of 14 or 16. So you have a lot of people who choose to retire early (as early as 49) and are receiving a decent "aposentaduria" (retirement). Some families choose to take up work as part-time help for others.
I used to have a maid come in for about 4 hours once a week. She'd do all of our laundry, clean the house, wash whatever dishes were dirty, etc. She had a number of customers like us, plus one that'd pay her a set amount per month to come every day for a couple hours a day and clean/cook dinner. She was making about R$2,000 a month plus her retirement. It was a pretty decent amount, when a good salary for people my age was around R$3,000.
I'm Brazilian and watched this with my American gf and although she found the photography and story beautiful she understandably couldn't really relate to the context.
Here in Brazil (perhaps specially in the older Northeast, where I'm from) having a maid is still very strong but has changed considerable in the past two decades.
It used to be the case that these maids would work for a family for decades without any of the guarantees that Brazilian work laws guarantee. Whether or not one agrees with those laws is secondary to the fact that these workers were largely kept out of it for ages.
It used to also be the case that families would require maids to sleep in the house. Woman who had their own family often had to accept spending nights on their "patrões" home to make sure they were there ready to work at 6am.
I really hated Roma. I don't say that lightly. I'm in violent agreement with Richard Brody's review:
> That effacement of Cleo’s character, her reduction to a bland and blank trope that burnishes the director’s conscience while smothering her consciousness and his own, is the essential and crucial failure of “Roma.” It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.
It's this way with all the characters. They're all shallow, one-dimensional tropes you're never given any reason to care about. Except for the domestic servants, they're all unlikeable.
Worse, I found the film outright boring (I say this as someone who loves Barry Lyndon).
The scene shown on the movie poster that I gather is supposed to have a big emotional impact, just left me feeling manipulated. It's telegraphed to you from a mile away, and then the family claiming they love the maid, it just isn't believable given how they've ignored her and mostly treated her like crap.
Speaking of crap, the dog shit. Why the hell was that so important to Cuarón that he features it, what, a dozen times?
Finally, I really didn't care for the B&W combined with digital. The overall effect just looked contrived to me. (I watched it on 100" screen with a calibrated JVC D-ILA projector, so I think I viewed it pretty close to how the director intended.)
If you want to see a brilliant 2018 film about the human condition and a family dealing with trying circumstances, watch Shoplifters instead. I viewed Roma and Shoplifters the same evening. I'm so glad I watched the latter and wish I could have my two hours back from the former.
TL;DR: Roma sucks, watch Shoplifters instead. Or Tokyo Story if you want to see Roma done right.
I grew up in Latin America, so I guess I can give you some context about some of this stuff. I am not going to defend the entertainment value of the movie, because I personally found it pretty boring (I guess the voyeuristic value isn't there for me, having grown up in a similar environment).
> It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.
The assumption here is that Cuarón should've made the film about Cleo, by giving her a voice and explaining to us her point of view... when maybe Cuarón might be trying to show us how he was unable to really understand this person who had a very rich life outside of his world. If Cuarón's experience was always defined by a very simple interface (that of the "sirvienta" or "mucama"), then it's understandable that his version of her is a muted - one could say desaturated - version of the real person.
> ...and then the family claiming they love the maid, it just isn't believable given how they've ignored her and mostly treated her like crap.
Most families' relationships with their maids is super weird. My family was never affluent enough to afford one, but I had plenty of friends who had a "sirvienta" (the Argentine equivalent of Cleo's role). To the kids, the sirvienta was a second mother, to the parents the sirvienta was a friend, psychiatrist and help. All of them would talk fondly of their sirvientas as if they were part of the family... to an extent. If a sirvienta falls in hard times (be it health, money or otherwise), the family doesn't usually offer to help.
In other words, as long as the sirvienta is in the house, she's part of the family. The moment she leaves, she's just an stranger they didn't really care that much for. Very strange.
> Speaking of crap, the dog shit. Why the hell was that so important to Cuarón that he features it, what, a dozen times?
I think this is Cuarón's rendering of the kind of things that imprint on you as a kid. I remember my first time walking around La Boca, in Buenos Aires, after living abroad for a few years. The amount of dog shit on the sidewalk was staggering. I was surprised, even though I grew up less than an hour away from there. I could see myself remembering the dog shit had I grown up in La Boca.
> If Cuarón's experience was always defined by a very simple interface (that of the "sirvienta" or "mucama"), then it's understandable that his version of her is a muted - one could say desaturated - version of the real person
That's just rationalizing away the fact that the film's subject was poorly handled by the film's director. Someone else - and I'm not suggesting that has to be someone whose experiences more closely map to Cleo's - could have told this story better, or at least in a way that would have felt less out of touch.
The film was pretty beautiful but dramatically, a miss.
I'm sure there's a great movie to be made about Cleo's life, from her perspective and showing us more of the underbelly of Mexican society at the time. My - admittedly half-assed argument - is that Cuarón might have not had that movie in mind, and analyzing the film as "Cuarón screwed up by not making the film I wanted to see" misses that point.
I wish I had seen way more about the ship that comes and picks up the baby and her mother at the end of Children of Men... but the movie wasn't about them.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. In retrospect I didn’t think much of Children of Men or Gravity either, and I can’t even remember what I thought of Y Tu Mamá También, so it apparently didn’t leave much impression on me. Maybe he’s just not my cup of tea.
My upset with Roma was given how critically acclaimed it is, I was expecting a lot more. I appreciate your perspective but I still don’t think the film is worthy of the praise it’s been given. I went and read a ton of reviews after to try to understand what I might be missing and I just ended up getting more and more annoyed. Oh well.
Roma is a terrible movie. Pretty sure the author - like me - turned it off after the first scene. Oh black and white? Stone and water splashing over it? Must be a real "artistic" "film." If only it had tried to be good.
I don't understand the condescension in this comment. Do you think cinema can't be art? You seem incredulous that people might actually get a ton of value out of engaging with something at this level.
I guess target audience might be the wrong term since I'm not really thinking of a target audience in terms of "teenage guys who like sports" and stuff like that, but more along the lines of "people who like slow-paced movies about family drama and adolescence".
For example my favorite film, "A Brighter Summer Day" (1991), is four hours long. It's almost certainly not going to be your cup of tea if you dislike long and slow-paced movies, but that doesn't make it a bad film. It just means that it isn't for you.
I mean - to take the two ends of the spectrum - that some music, movies etc are made because the director/writer wants to make it, because doing so is meaningful to them. They're the ones that get called art, whether good or bad art. Every part is determined by the desires and taste of the creator. They're all about the creators' desires, imagination, experiments, taste, self-expression.
Others are made kind of backwards, first by figuring out the target audience, writing a plot filled with the kinds of things that have made money recently, then making that. Making music/movies by formula. Every part is determined by the supposed desires and taste of the 'target audience'. They're all about marketing and making money.
A work of art comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that people want what they want. – Oscar Wilde
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything. – Wilde
[An artist] cares about the end-result as a completion of what goes before and not because of its conformity or lack of conformity with a ready-made antecedent scheme... Like the scientific inquirer, he permits the subject-matter of his perception in connection with the problems it presents to determine the issue, instead of insisting upon its agreement with a conclusion decided upon in advance. ...one of the essential traits of the artist is that he is born an experimenter. Without this trait he becomes a poor or a good academician. The artist is compelled to be an experimenter because he has to express an intensely individualized experience through means and materials that belong to the common and public world. This problem cannot be solved once for all. It is met in every new work undertaken. Otherwise an artist repeats himself and becomes esthetically dead. – Dewey, Art as Experience
I wonder what it is like to think that deeply about "entertainment"? I can think in code for hours but writing about the opening scene as done in this article would be much worse than just watching it. It's hard for me to even imagine spending that much thought to analyze a movie. I wonder how much time the author spent on the article? I can't even imagine. I probably need therapy...
Oftentimes it's a matter of "you get out what you put into it". Some people are content watching film and engaging with it only on the surface level (and that's fine!), but others enjoy really diving in and ruminating on the different aspects of the art.
I think there's immense value in being able to engage with something creative (whether it's music, film, poetry, performance) at this level, and I honestly feel sadness for people who never give it a chance.
It's similar to discovering a new code library that you admire and want to learn more about. You'd dive into the code, analyze it, pick it apart, try to understand the intent of the author and how you could learn from it to improve your craft.
It is a cultural thing that is probably left over from the colonization era. Things will change but it takes time.
He being an American of generally liberal persuasion tried, as your family did, to treat the cook and gardener as 'equals'.
Over time that changed though. One day the maid sat him down and politely explained that it was sort of insulting to be treated too familiar in this context. She was speaking of the gardener and said, "What you are doing makes him feel very uncomfortable". She explained, "the old man there is kneeling in your garden pulling weeds 8 hours a day, and you come home...breeze in in your 50K auto and ask him if he wants to share a beer with you..."
He realized she was right. These people were not "passionate about their career", in fact there was no career, nor even the semblance of it. They were just doing whatever possible work they could do to earn enough money to keep food on their families table. Treating them too familiar, or even implying they shared lots of things in common, was sort of demeaning.
In the end, he wound up treating them very formally. "Sr Veracruz" "Sra Sanchez" etc...always keeping a sort of respectful distance between them. Posting work schedules, etc and generally treating them like employees.
I'm not at all against what you said, nor implying you guys didn't do what was right, simply showing there are more than one interpretation of such situations.
in china, nanny's are generally relatives. the grandparents, an aunt or a cousin. so they are part of the family. they are there because they are genuinely needed to share the work, there is no class difference. only when relatives are not available, someone else is hired, but their status is not much different.
Assuming you are paying a fair salary, other cultures/countries don't have a housekeeper (even as a part-time work) because they cannot afford one not because it is an ethical or moral thing. In general, families with children need a lot of extra help when parents work.
I used to have a maid come in for about 4 hours once a week. She'd do all of our laundry, clean the house, wash whatever dishes were dirty, etc. She had a number of customers like us, plus one that'd pay her a set amount per month to come every day for a couple hours a day and clean/cook dinner. She was making about R$2,000 a month plus her retirement. It was a pretty decent amount, when a good salary for people my age was around R$3,000.
Here in Brazil (perhaps specially in the older Northeast, where I'm from) having a maid is still very strong but has changed considerable in the past two decades.
It used to be the case that these maids would work for a family for decades without any of the guarantees that Brazilian work laws guarantee. Whether or not one agrees with those laws is secondary to the fact that these workers were largely kept out of it for ages.
It used to also be the case that families would require maids to sleep in the house. Woman who had their own family often had to accept spending nights on their "patrões" home to make sure they were there ready to work at 6am.
> That effacement of Cleo’s character, her reduction to a bland and blank trope that burnishes the director’s conscience while smothering her consciousness and his own, is the essential and crucial failure of “Roma.” It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/theres-a-voi...
It's this way with all the characters. They're all shallow, one-dimensional tropes you're never given any reason to care about. Except for the domestic servants, they're all unlikeable.
Worse, I found the film outright boring (I say this as someone who loves Barry Lyndon).
The scene shown on the movie poster that I gather is supposed to have a big emotional impact, just left me feeling manipulated. It's telegraphed to you from a mile away, and then the family claiming they love the maid, it just isn't believable given how they've ignored her and mostly treated her like crap.
Speaking of crap, the dog shit. Why the hell was that so important to Cuarón that he features it, what, a dozen times?
Finally, I really didn't care for the B&W combined with digital. The overall effect just looked contrived to me. (I watched it on 100" screen with a calibrated JVC D-ILA projector, so I think I viewed it pretty close to how the director intended.)
If you want to see a brilliant 2018 film about the human condition and a family dealing with trying circumstances, watch Shoplifters instead. I viewed Roma and Shoplifters the same evening. I'm so glad I watched the latter and wish I could have my two hours back from the former.
TL;DR: Roma sucks, watch Shoplifters instead. Or Tokyo Story if you want to see Roma done right.
> It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.
The assumption here is that Cuarón should've made the film about Cleo, by giving her a voice and explaining to us her point of view... when maybe Cuarón might be trying to show us how he was unable to really understand this person who had a very rich life outside of his world. If Cuarón's experience was always defined by a very simple interface (that of the "sirvienta" or "mucama"), then it's understandable that his version of her is a muted - one could say desaturated - version of the real person.
> ...and then the family claiming they love the maid, it just isn't believable given how they've ignored her and mostly treated her like crap.
Most families' relationships with their maids is super weird. My family was never affluent enough to afford one, but I had plenty of friends who had a "sirvienta" (the Argentine equivalent of Cleo's role). To the kids, the sirvienta was a second mother, to the parents the sirvienta was a friend, psychiatrist and help. All of them would talk fondly of their sirvientas as if they were part of the family... to an extent. If a sirvienta falls in hard times (be it health, money or otherwise), the family doesn't usually offer to help.
In other words, as long as the sirvienta is in the house, she's part of the family. The moment she leaves, she's just an stranger they didn't really care that much for. Very strange.
> Speaking of crap, the dog shit. Why the hell was that so important to Cuarón that he features it, what, a dozen times?
I think this is Cuarón's rendering of the kind of things that imprint on you as a kid. I remember my first time walking around La Boca, in Buenos Aires, after living abroad for a few years. The amount of dog shit on the sidewalk was staggering. I was surprised, even though I grew up less than an hour away from there. I could see myself remembering the dog shit had I grown up in La Boca.
That's just rationalizing away the fact that the film's subject was poorly handled by the film's director. Someone else - and I'm not suggesting that has to be someone whose experiences more closely map to Cleo's - could have told this story better, or at least in a way that would have felt less out of touch.
The film was pretty beautiful but dramatically, a miss.
I wish I had seen way more about the ship that comes and picks up the baby and her mother at the end of Children of Men... but the movie wasn't about them.
My upset with Roma was given how critically acclaimed it is, I was expecting a lot more. I appreciate your perspective but I still don’t think the film is worthy of the praise it’s been given. I went and read a ton of reviews after to try to understand what I might be missing and I just ended up getting more and more annoyed. Oh well.
Speaking of Great Gatsby, I did enjoy Burning.
The Princess Bride... now that’s a classic.
Well, I cried like a baby at the scene at the beach.
For example my favorite film, "A Brighter Summer Day" (1991), is four hours long. It's almost certainly not going to be your cup of tea if you dislike long and slow-paced movies, but that doesn't make it a bad film. It just means that it isn't for you.
Not all movies are liked by all people and that‘s ok, or why would it not be?
Others are made kind of backwards, first by figuring out the target audience, writing a plot filled with the kinds of things that have made money recently, then making that. Making music/movies by formula. Every part is determined by the supposed desires and taste of the 'target audience'. They're all about marketing and making money.
A work of art comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that people want what they want. – Oscar Wilde
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything. – Wilde
[An artist] cares about the end-result as a completion of what goes before and not because of its conformity or lack of conformity with a ready-made antecedent scheme... Like the scientific inquirer, he permits the subject-matter of his perception in connection with the problems it presents to determine the issue, instead of insisting upon its agreement with a conclusion decided upon in advance. ...one of the essential traits of the artist is that he is born an experimenter. Without this trait he becomes a poor or a good academician. The artist is compelled to be an experimenter because he has to express an intensely individualized experience through means and materials that belong to the common and public world. This problem cannot be solved once for all. It is met in every new work undertaken. Otherwise an artist repeats himself and becomes esthetically dead. – Dewey, Art as Experience
I think there's immense value in being able to engage with something creative (whether it's music, film, poetry, performance) at this level, and I honestly feel sadness for people who never give it a chance.