FILM: Roma

I had heard a broad range of reactions from friends who’d seen Roma, from “beautiful” to “like watching paint dry”, and I think it depends what you want from a film. If you’re looking for a clever plot, laughs, or great action, you’ll find Roma very unsatisfying. But if you appreciate a film that shows you a slice of life in a way that really makes you think, or if you appreciate a film that genuinely evokes a time, a place, a mood, then you’ll find much to appreciate. And if you’re the sort of film fan who loves the art of film -- someone who loved Linklater’s Boyhood, who reveled in the opening scene of Altman’s The Player, who can discourse on the technique of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock -- you’ll be loving this film from its opening scene: water repeatedly surging and receding across some unlocatable pavement, eventually coming to stillness reflecting an opening onto a piece of sky in which an airplane slowly flies across. One viewer’s masterpiece is another viewer’s paint drying. Me, I appreciated watching the paint. Some of the scenes were almost painterly, like “Pageant of the Masters” in their composition, and yet completely natural. I found everything worked to create a complex impression. There was the sense of childhood, its innocence, and the nostalgia of its recollection for the children in this family, as you watch them being happy and oblivious as serious things happen to the adults they love and feel close to. You can sense the director being reflective of his own childhood experiences in that time and place. There was the ambiguous relationship of the nanny to the family, some fuzzy place between employee-servant and beloved family member, both attached and detached. There was the comfort of this home and this neighborhood, with social and political unrest just scraping the side of the car occasionally as they ride through their lives. And it was beautiful.