The
director’s new film tells the story of his childhood in Mexico — but
seen from the vantage of the domestic worker who raised him.
In
Pietrasanta, Italy — a small town where Michelangelo used to shop for
marble — a tall brick bell tower tolls throughout the day from a church
on one side of the historic central square. Several enormous sculptures
punctuate the plaza: faceless heads with bizarre hair wrought in brass,
iron and steel. Against the green hills of Tuscany and the imposing
white marble church, they look like the remains of a Dadaist prank.
Around the plaza’s edges, tourists and locals congregate in cafes for
morning cappuccini and evening aperitivi.
This fall, the 57-year-old Mexican film director Alfonso Cuarón, whose
youngest child attends school in Pietrasanta, met me there for endless
cups of green tea. At a distance, walking through the square in a hoodie
and black sneakers, cellphone pressed against his head, Cuarón looked
like a middle-aged skater. Up close, speaking in Spanish, the language
in which he still dreams and in which we held all our conversations, he
often regarded me with a shrewd gaze. But then, once, Cuarón broke off
midsentence to point through the plaza.
“Look,
the dolphin got away,” he said. “Over there, look!” A helium balloon
shaped like a small dolphin floated across the square. “There’s the
girl,” Cuarón said, directing my attention to a child on the far side of
the plaza who stared after the dolphin as it soared over the
sculptures, toward the bell. Cuarón’s eyes darted between her and
balloon. “It looks very pretty,” he said. “Look against the tower, too.
That would be a nice photo, swimming next to the bell. ¡Qué bonito! Did you see? It was turning too, swimming, and its shadow even went behind the bell.”
The
little girl began weeping in her mother’s arms. “Oh, poor thing, it got
away. Her dolphin got away.” Cuarón’s voice turned soft with empathy.
Suddenly, he sucked in his breath. “I remember that childish feeling:
that you open your hand almost, almost just because you can. And feeling
in that moment when the string, yes, it’s slipping away, that, yes,
there are consequences. The string is slipping. That moment of, Oh! And
already you know that you can’t catch it. How I remember that. Ay, pobrecita.”
He watched the girl a moment longer. Then he sipped his tea, chuckled —
at the situation, at himself — and turned back to business. “Well,
then.”
It’s tempting to compare
Cuarón’s extraordinary new film, “Roma” — which has already won the
Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and begins streaming on Netflix
on Dec. 14 — to landmark neorealist movies. An exquisite party scene at a
country estate reminded me of Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game.” A
climax near a churning ocean brought to mind François Truffaut’s “The
400 Blows.” A landscape of urban poverty recalled Vittorio De Sica’s
“Bicycle Thieves.” But Cuarón himself sought to imitate no one. What he
wanted was something like the scene of the girl and her dolphin balloon:
beauty, naturalism and spontaneous emotion.
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To
achieve this, Cuarón returned to Mexico to shoot a film in his homeland
for the first time in nearly 20 years. He hired a cast of mostly
nonactors and filmed in absolute continuity. None of the cast and crew
ever saw the script, so every plot twist hit them with surprise. The
crew was so blindsided by one scene that they burst into tears as the
camera rolled. Actors were given their lines only the morning of the
shoot. Many times, they had no lines at all; Cuarón simply suggested how
they might react to other characters or even disrupt an entire scene.
Often Cuarón gave them contradictory instructions. “So when we began
filming, we had chaos,” he said. “And that was it. Everyone would have
to exist inside that chaos, as in life.” More than anything, he told me,
his job was to watch the actors carefully to spot the moments when some
essential truth emerged.
For most of
his life, Cuarón has struggled to juggle his auteur ambitions with his
need to stay solvent. For years, when asked why he directed this or that
Hollywood movie — “Great Expectations,” say, or “Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban” — Cuarón has given journalists variations on “I was
running out of money and I needed to survive.” He wrote “Gravity” with
his eldest son, Jonás Cuarón, in a fit of desperation after another
project they started lost its funding in the 2008 financial crisis.
Together they knocked out a rough draft of the script in a day. Making
the existential space thriller, however, took four and a half years — a
process complicated by the challenges of filming the effects of
microgravity and the need to sign an A-list star to justify its $100
million budget. Sandra Bullock ultimately agreed to spend nine hours at a
time in a 10-by-10-foot special-effects box, executing choreographed
moves so precise that her acting verged on modern dance. Released in
2013, “Gravity” grossed more than $700 million worldwide, won seven
Academy Awards and made Cuarón the first Mexican ever to receive the
Oscar for best director. After that, he could shoot whatever he liked.
“They
offered me bigger pictures with bigger budgets, bigger everything,”
Cuarón explained. Instead, he poured himself into “Roma”: a
Spanish-language, black-and-white period piece. Most of the film is set
in the same Roma neighborhood of Mexico City where Cuarón grew up.
Ninety percent of its scenes were inspired by his family’s history.
“This,” his manager, Steve Golin, told me, “was the most expensive home
movie ever made.”
What Cuarón wanted,
the director told me, was to make “a kind of spiritual X-ray of my
family, with its wounds and its sores.” Staring into childhood trauma,
stylizing it, exploring it from the vantage of maturity in order to
understand the construction of the self: Such therapeutic forensics are
so common among artists that they’re almost a cliché. Cuarón’s
brilliance lies not in his subject but in his decision to make himself a
peripheral character. Almost every scene includes an event that would
have been unforgettable for a young boy: the night he witnessed a fire,
the afternoon he discovered a family secret, the day he nearly killed a
sibling. But you need to track back to piece that all together, because
Paco, the character based on Cuarón, rarely holds the center of the
frame. Instead “Roma” follows Cleo — a character based on a domestic
worker who has lived with Cuarón’s family ever since he was a newborn.
Yalitza Aparicio, left, and Marco Graf in “Roma.”CreditCarlos Somonte/Netflix
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Alfonso Cuarón Orozco
was born in 1961 into a secretive, insular, paternalistic Mexico that
had been ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for more
than 30 years. To outsiders, that Mexico looked like an economic
“miracle”: Its gross domestic product grew more than 6 percent a year
between 1950 and 1969. But the PRI’s focus on rapid industrialization
came at the expense of vast agrarian communities. Half of Mexico’s
domestic income was pocketed by less than a quarter of its work force.
Destitute peasants fled to urban centers, where they settled in
shantytowns like Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a slum 10 miles east of Mexico
City that eventually held more than a million people. Undergirding such
inequality was the PRI’s suppression of information and dissent. In
1968, when thousands of students gathered at the Tlatelolco housing
complex to protest the violence of Mexico City’s police, the government
opened fire on them. In 1971, it slaughtered protesters again during the
Corpus Christi massacre.
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One
of the most potent memories of Cuarón’s childhood is an absolute lack
of freedom of expression. He felt it viscerally at school, where he and
his three siblings tried to hide the fact that their father, Alfredo
Cuarón, a doctor specializing in nuclear medicine, abandoned their
family when Cuarón was 10. Dr. Cuarón never paid much attention to his
second-eldest son — Cuarón has few childhood memories of him — but after
his departure their contact slowly dwindled to nothing. His mother,
Cristina Orozco, a pharmaceutical biochemist, struggled alone to pay the
family’s bills. (She bought Cuarón a Super 8 camera, but couldn’t
afford to keep him stocked in film.) In high school, priests taught that
divorce was a mortal sin. Cuarón never believed that, but when other
kids asked questions, he lied: Of course his father lived at home. He
just needed to travel for work. A lot.
“That
contributed to whatever continued later on as insecurities, as
solitudes,” he said. “It also had a lot do with a pretty lonely
adolescence where film was not only a passion, it turned into a refuge,
into the only friend.” Long before his parents split, Cuarón knew he
wanted to make films. When his cousins played war games, he played
“shooting war movies.” But when he was a Catholic-school pariah, his
need for cinematic escape intensified. He tried to visit every single
movie theater in Mexico City, often watching a double feature a day.
Cuarón
found tenderness mostly in Liboria Rodríguez, a domestic worker who, he
said, is like his second mother. She sat next to him at the movies and
told him stories about Tepelmeme, the Oaxacan pueblo where she was born.
He grew up calling her “Mamá” as well. “I think that it’s one of the
strongest emotional ties in my family,” Cuarón says of Rodríguez. “It’s
part of that very perverse relationship that the bourgeoisie has with
domestic workers. It’s that on one hand, yes, they do the laundry, they
do the cooking, they do the shopping. But in addition to working
extremely hard in what would be the definition of their employment, they
also take on roles that should be filled by the parents, you know? They
wake the children, they give them breakfast, they tuck them into bed,
they pick them up from school. That presence is so beautiful, but why is
that presence needed? Simply because the parents are absent.”
After
“Gravity,” when Cuarón decided to make a movie about these years, he
asked Rodríguez and his family for permission. “I said yes,” Rodríguez
told me, recalling their conversation. “That’s already healed. It’s not
important anymore. So it’s fine now.” They spent hours on long-distance
calls talking about the tiniest details of her daily life in the 1970s.
What kind of alarm clock did she use? Where did she keep her clothes?
When I asked if she would like money for her story, she scoffed. “How
barbaric. I did it because he’s my child. It’s something done for love.”
Cuarón and Liboria Rodríguez onstage during the premiere of “Roma” in New York in October.CreditNicholas Hunt/Getty Images
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Reconstructing
their past, Cuarón saw how little, as a child, he understood of her
life. As an indigenous woman born into rural poverty, Rodríguez suffered
different heartbreaks and challenges than her white, middle-class
employers. “When I was a boy, she would tell me about her pueblo, and
she told me about the terrible cold they suffered and the hunger they
suffered. But for me as a boy, it’s the cold equivalent to ‘Shoot, I
forgot my sweater to the movie,’ and the hunger is ‘[Expletive], they’re
running two hours late with dinner,’ you know? I had no awareness,”
Cuarón said. His grandmother discouraged Rodríguez from using
electricity for anything other than work. “The family can have all the
damn lights on all day, and it’s her job to go around turning them all
off while the family is upstairs, but they” — domestic workers — “are
not allowed to use electricity in their own room.” Cuarón shook his head
with disgust. “It speaks not only to what she did, but to my family’s
attitude toward her.”
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Cuarón
methodically shredded his old blindness so he could make Rodríguez the
protagonist of “Roma.” The film paints 1970s classism, parental neglect
and federal violence with icy neutrality, but love colors its close-ups
of Cleo, the character he based on Rodríguez. She bears witness to many
of her employers’ humiliations: slaps, betrayals, car accidents. Cuarón
makes us the witnesses to hers. She works while her employers relax and
rests only when they sleep. The children snuggle with her. The adults
bark at her. By training and by necessity, Cleo shares little of what
she thinks, and even less of what she feels, with other characters. She
is a woman of tremendous sensitivity and limited verbal expression.
The
search for an actor to carry this tricky role took eight months. The
casting director, Luis Rosales, traveled all over southern Mexico
auditioning more than 3,000 women in cities and villages. Then one day
Yalitza Aparicio appeared at an audition in a town in Oaxaca as a favor
to her sister. Aparicio had just finished her degree at a teachers’
college and was looking forward to taking charge of her own preschool
classroom. She and her close friend Nancy García, who plays the family
cook, decided to do “Roma” as a lark. “At the beginning, I told Alfonso I
don’t know how to act,” Aparacio told me. “He said: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll
explain it to you later.’ ” She laughed. “I’m still waiting.” Yet
Aparacio possesses an ability to convey emotion through the tiniest
shifts in her brows and eyes. In one powerful scene she suggests Cleo’s
entire sexual history while murmuring no more than a handful of words.
Some
journalists have accused Cuarón of not going far enough, claiming that
Cleo is a passive character. The criticism puzzles Cuarón. “There’s a
flaw in commercial film where the strong character, the active
character, has to give big speeches and make big disclosures,” Cuarón
told me. He wanted to show Cleo’s strength without deforming her into a
Hollywood stereotype. “She doesn’t have grand speeches, but in the end
she’s someone who binds together an entire family.”
Cuarón on the set of “Gravity” with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.CreditWarner Brothers/Photofest
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‘‘Technique,” “style,” “content,” “language”:
Cuarón often feels frustrated with the way journalists use these words.
When critics equate “form” with appearance or “content” with plot,
they’re being facile, he said. And when people ask him what’s more
important: technique or story? “Then you say: They definitely don’t
understand what cinema is. Because what they’re calling technique in
film — and I’m not talking about commercial movies — isn’t technique.
It’s language. When Tarkovsky makes decisions about framing and about
how to move the camera, they’re not technical decisions, or even
stylistic ones. They’re requirements of the language that he needs for
his filmic experience.”
Cuarón’s own
cinematic development was hamstrung for decades, he explained, by an
overvaluation of aesthetics. As a teenager, he disdained the sloppy
technique he watched in many contemporary Mexican movies. The shots, the
sound, the scripts: Compared with the foreign movies he adored,
everything looked off. He and his close friend Emmanuel Lubezki, whom he
met when he was about 16, shared an obsession with learning how to make
movies look and sound dazzling. Lubezki has gone on to win three
Academy Awards for cinematography. But as teenagers the two had little
to show for their ambition but ripped movie-theater tickets and
arrogance. The attitude got them tossed out of the National Autonomous
University of Mexico’s film school, CUEC, where they and their friends
Luis Estrada and Carlos Marcovich cut classes and ridiculed the films
that some professors screened. “We were a bunch of little mamones, you know?” Cuarón told me. “I’m sure we were insufferable.”
But
after his first child, Jonás, was born in 1981, when Cuarón was 20, he
shelved his cinematic dreams in favor of supporting his son. With no
prospects and no degree, he took a job at the National Museum of Art and
was rescued from a career as a sad bureaucrat only when the producer
Fernando Cámara and the director José Luis García Agraz came searching
for him a year later. If Cuarón left right away to become the assistant
director for one of their pictures, they’d pay him even more than his
pathetic salary.
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So
began Cuarón’s life as a “blue collar” worker in the Mexican film
industry. Boom operator, editor, production assistant, assistant
cameraman: He took every gig he could until he established himself as
the go-to assistant director for foreign productions filming in Mexico.
That was his best shot at learning technique in the 1980s. State funding
for films had almost disappeared. Many Mexican directors scrounged
together a living by shooting political spots for corrupt politicians or
“videohomes,” cheap films shot quickly for export to Mexican immigrants
in the United States. Scarce resources fostered a culture of secrecy
and rivalry. One well-respected Mexican cinematographer would cover his
lenses on set, so that no one could learn which apertures he used.
Cuarón feared that he might never direct anything of his own.
Then in the late ’80s, Carmen Armendáriz hired him and Lubezki at “Hora Marcada”
(“Appointed Hour”), a knockoff of “The Twilight Zone” that Cuarón and
others called “The Toilet Zone” for its dismal budget. “It was the
greatest thing that ever happened to us,” Lubezki told me. “It was like a
paid workshop.” The show needed smart, cheap content, he explained, so
it used young talent. “All the filmmakers from that generation are
somehow involved in ‘Hora.’ ” Cuarón
shot five episodes, directed another six and befriended a young,
ambitious director named Guillermo del Toro. After writing five episodes
together, Cuarón and his brother Carlos wrote the script for his first
feature: “Sólo con Tu Pareja,” a farce about a Casanova who is tricked into believing that he’s H.I.V.-positive.
Back
then the few Mexican movies that got made depended on financing from
the government, so film-commission bureaucrats demanded a certain
deference. “They expected you to kiss the ring,” Cuarón told me.
Instead, he invested all his savings into “Sólo”
and borrowed money so he could keep a majority stake. You’re not even
my business partner, he told his bureaucratic liaison, you’re a
government employee who won’t be here in a few years. The bureaucrat
regarded him with equal scorn. Nobody’s interested in Mexican film,
Cuarón recalls him saying. Not even Mexicans.
When Miramax showed interest in the world rights to “Sólo”
and the film was picked up by the Toronto International Film Festival
in 1991, Cuarón appeared to have won. But Miramax later withdrew from
the deal, and the Mexican film commission held up theatrical release for
more than a year, leaving Cuarón broke. He could go back to being
Mexico City’s best assistant director. But if he wanted to keep
directing films, the only way he survive was to land work in Hollywood.
For
two years, Cuarón shuttled back and forth between Mexico and
California. His relationship with Jonás’s mother, Mariana Elizondo, had
fallen apart. In Los Angeles, he lived out of a beat-up Volkswagen
Rabbit and crashed with friends like Lubezki. Every dollar he saved on
motels was a dollar he could bring back home. He jokes that he was a
“wetback deluxe.”
His break came in
1993 when Sydney Pollack hired him to direct an episode of “Fallen
Angels,” a Showtime series that he produced. Aiming for highbrow at a
time when cable movie channels showed mostly soft porn, “Fallen Angels”
contracted a roster of hotshot directors, like Steven Soderbergh and
Jonathan Kaplan. To keep the budget low, however, Pollack also hired
Cuarón. “We brought him in because we thought we could beat him up to do
it for less money,” Steve Golin, then a producer on the series, told
me.
Cuarón felt so insecure when he
showed up for shooting that he stuttered when he spoke English and could
barely bring himself to talk to the lead actors, Alan Rickman and Laura
Dern. By the end of Day 1, he was wildly behind schedule. Then Rickman
called for him. Cuarón dreaded being chewed out. He found Dern and
Rickman sitting together. Alfonso, Rickman said. We are here for you. We
want you to tell us what you want. We believe in you.
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That
night Cuarón and Lubezki stayed in a dive motel near the Hollywood
sign. There were stains all over the carpets, stains all over the
sheets, stains all over the synthetic coverlet. “All that night I wanted
to cry,” Cuarón told me. “But there were Alan’s words.” The next
morning, he announced that they would reshoot all the scenes they’d done
the day before. His assistant director protested, but Cuarón insisted.
They reshot Day 1 and shot everything they needed for Day 2. In the end,
Cuarón’s episode, “Murder, Obliquely,” won a CableACE Award for best
directing, paving the way for the rest of his career.
So
began Cuarón’s years as a director for hire. He moved to New York — he
says he couldn’t bear the industry chatter in Los Angeles — and devoted
himself to reading scripts. A studio executive advised him that if he
wanted work in Hollywood, he shouldn’t mention writing. At first, this
wasn’t so painful. Cuarón focused on polishing other skills. His third
film, “Great Expectations” (1998), is proof of how quickly he came to
master every aspect of movie production: sets, costumes, lighting,
sound, choreography, shot-planning. When the French critic Michel Ciment
screened a clip of it at Cannes last year — a long take of Ethan Hawke
searching for Gwyneth Paltrow as an aria plays — the audience responded
with cheers. But Cuarón himself looked sheepish.
He
had signed on to “Great Expectations” because he needed money and liked
the idea of working with Robert De Niro. He didn’t really get Dickens,
but he thought he could compensate with visuals. As he shot the film
with Lubezki, though, he felt disgusted with the process of making only
aesthetic decisions. One day as he and Lubezki drove a van full of
lighting gear from a shoot in New Jersey, he gazed at the passing
landscape and asked out loud, “Why are we stylizing all this?”
Before
“Great Expectations” premiered, he was developing a screenplay for a
road movie with Miramax, to star Viggo Mortensen. But when “Great
Expectations” tanked, Miramax abandoned him again. The scripts that came
his way got worse. He didn’t like movies anymore. He didn’t like movie
people. In the midst of this depression, Cuarón rented a couple dozen of
his favorite films and holed himself up in his apartment on West 11th
Street for two weeks. The old cure still worked. Buoyed, he called his
brother Carlos and asked him to come to New York so they could write
another script. He and Lubezki ditched the dollies and cranes in favor
of hand-held cameras and natural lighting. The producer David Linde —
then a partner at Good Machine and now the executive producer for “Roma”
at Participant Media — financed the picture so that Cuarón could
reinvent himself in Mexico.
I can still remember sitting in a movie theater in New York in 2001, feeling wonder wash over me as I watched “Y Tu Mamá También.”
The plot follows a pair of raunchy teenage boys — played to superb
effect by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal — who have just graduated
from high school and luck into a road trip with a hot older woman
(Maribel Verdú). Cuarón places their poignant and hilarious sexcapades
in a vivid neorealist landscape of social inequality and political
repression. In one continuous take, set inside the trio’s station wagon,
we hear Verdú sussing out what Luna and García Bernal know about
foreplay while, through the windshield, we see a police pickup truck
pass their car. The camera stays with the pickup. Through the station
wagon’s back window we see officers jump out with machine guns and round
up some campesinos. It’s racial
profiling in action, but the lead actors keep talking sex. They’re
traveling in a bubble of privilege, unperturbed by crimes committed
against those beneath their social class.
From left, Diego Luna, Maribel Verdú and Gael García Bernal in “Y Tu Mamá También.”CreditIFC Films/Photofest
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Cuarón’s
second mother, Liboria Rodríguez, has a bit part in the film, as a
domestic worker who carries a sandwich on a plate to Luna. As she walks
through a mansion, a telephone rings and rings. Loafing on a sofa, Luna
ignores it until “Leo” hands him lunch, passes him the phone and pats
his head. Later in the movie, Luna remembers her as the station wagon
passes the village where she was born, but he says nothing to his
feckless companions. Fleeting though they are, these scenes stayed with
me for years. In them, you can feel the mix of affection and indignation
that would fuel “Roma.”
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Critics
often focus on Cuarón’s prowess with the long take. Certainly, his
12½-minute opening for “Gravity” — shot by Lubezki — ranks among
cinema’s more jaw-dropping feats. For Cuarón, however, the long take is
only a means to an end. “The Olympics of the long take don’t interest
me,” he says. “Roma” contains scenes that are full of quick cuts. “It’s
about how to lead to that thematic content through the filmic
experience,” he told me, “so that it’s given in the filmic experience,
not explained.”
He broke into an acid
smile. “Almost all commercial film is film where you can go, buy your
popcorn, sit in the movie theater, start eating. The moment that they
shut off the lights, you close your eyes. You keep eating popcorn. They
turn on the lights. You open your eyes, and you haven’t missed a thing.
They told you everything. They’re like audiobooks, like illustrated
radio novels.” Try that routine with any of the films that Cuarón wrote
after “Sólo” and you’ll miss at least half the story.
After “Mamá,”
Cuarón married the Italian actress and journalist Annalisa Bugliani,
fathered two children with her (Tess and Olmo) and improved his leverage
in Hollywood, which invited him to direct the third installment of the
lucrative Harry Potter franchise. Even as he enjoyed success, however,
many of his old insecurities remained. His father briefly resurfaced and
tried to rewrite their personal history. (Never bothering, however, to
learn the name of Cuarón’s oldest child, Jonás. “He called him Jason,”
Cuarón says.) His prescient dystopian thriller, “Children of Men”
(2006), which was nominated for three Academy Awards, disappointed at
the box office. His marriage with Bugliani fell apart in 2008. As Cuarón
wrote “Gravity,” he worried not only about supporting his kids, but
also about paying divorce lawyers. Its story of a woman floating alone
in space trying to survive catastrophe and grief may be read as an
expression of his own emotional state.
Once upon a time,
just seeing the front pages of The Hollywood Reporter or Variety in the
elevators of the Chateau Marmont hotel could trigger an attack of
self-doubt in Cuarón. Why had he turned down the chance to direct the
film that now raked in those huge box-office receipts? Why had he passed
on the script that now attracted such a star-studded cast? Shedding
some of this insecurity is part of what Cuarón means when he said that
he needed to develop certain “emotional tools” before he could make
“Roma.” “This was the moment that I could do that story and make it
stripping away all my creative controls. Let myself go, you know? The
confidence to fail. Not to be afraid about what if it doesn’t work:
Well, it didn’t work, and I didn’t hurt anyone. I’ll go back to make
another ‘Gravity.’ There won’t be a problem. Nobody’s going to care that
I went to be indulgent with my movie in Mexico, you know?”
For
the first time in his career, he wrote a feature-length script entirely
by himself. He wrote scenes randomly at first, using memory as a kind
of Geiger counter to locate where the most potent material lay. He
didn’t question whether the script was too long or too short, whether it
had a first, second and third act, whether it would be boring. For a
while, he thought the screenplay might not have any plot, but he still
decided not to share it with his usual sounding boards — del Toro;
Carlos; the director Alejandro González Iñárritu, whom he met in the
1990s. Lubezki wanted to shoot it — “I thought that it was the most
beautiful script, probably, I’ve ever read in my life” — but shortly
after preproduction began he had to depart for a family situation. “I
would have never abandoned Alfonso in his most personal movie for
anything else.”
Cuarón gave producers
dates to research, having them look up, say, which television programs
played on a certain night in 1970. I was particularly stunned by his
recreation of the Corpus Christi massacre. Cuarón’s crew not only
watched archival footage of the event, they also located and interviewed
survivors. More than 800 extras were cast for the scene: students,
paramilitaries, police, bystanders. These moments in “Roma” amount to an
indictment of Mexico’s federal government, a dossier on a crime against
humanity.
When I told Cuarón how
struck I was by all of these historical details, he pulled out his
iPhone. A few taps later, he showed me a 1971 photograph of several men
squatting by beside a car, guns in hand, ready to fire at the students. ¡Ay!
I exclaimed. They looked just like the actors in “Roma.” He smiled with
satisfaction. “The same faces, the same wardrobe,” he said. “And it was
about finding the exact face.” He pointed at the cars parked near the
plainclothes paramilitaries. “In fact, it’s the same car that’s parked
here and the other car that’s a little forward. The only thing is that
because of the geographic position of where we were, it was reversed.
Instead of looking there,” he pointed to the left, “they’re looking
toward the right. In fact, I felt really stupid, because when we were
doing the image correction” — in postproduction — “I showed it to my
corrector, Steve Scott, and he said, ‘The only thing that you missed
there was putting in the photographer.’ It sent me into a rage. I said:
‘Arrgh! How stupid! How stupid that I didn’t do that!’ ”
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Such
precision glows through almost every frame of “Roma.” “In life there is
no foreground,” Cuarón said. “There are emotional relationships, but
everything that happens around you has a very big effect and influence
on you.” In one subtle shot, Cleo walks through the production designer
Eugenio Caballero’s meticulous reconstruction of the Nezahualcóyotl
shantytown in 1971. As she crosses the frame, an actor in the background
recites a political speech once given by a local PRI politician. “It’s a
marvelous speech,” Cuarón said. “It’s impressive because he promises
but doesn’t promise. That is, he says, We came to listen to your clamor for the need for running water — and everyone claps — and he says, But we’re not going to make empty promises.
And in the end that’s what it is.” He sneered, recalling the rest of
the background: a circus performer flying out of a cannon, professional
soccer players meeting ragged kids. “In the same rhetoric they’re
telling you: We know what you want, and we’re going to screw you, but
we’ll give you a ball and a human cannon and some T-shirts. And the band
begins to play.”
Cuarón on the set of “Roma.”CreditCarlos Somonte/Netflix
Image
To
Cuarón, it’s obvious that such extreme poverty and violence were the
logical consequence of the PRI’s long lock on power. “The PRI lived and
nursed off of that,” he said. That’s why Cuarón displayed President Luis
Echeverría Álvarez’s initials on a hill behind the training
paramilitaries. The PRI recruited the paramilitaries, he said, from the
socioeconomic bottom. “They’re invisible, and they’re given a
visibility. They’re given training. They’re given discipline, a feeling
of belonging, a feeling of being needed. And what is this used for? Not
to improve society, to improve social services. No.” The PRI set the
urban poor against the activists to kill both political liabilities at
once. “And what I’m saying about Mexico is also true in the rest of the
world,” Cuarón emphasized. “Because I love the way developed countries,
as we say in Mexico, nunca se ponen el saco” — never own their guilt. “It’s always, ‘Mexico is like this, like this, like this.’ And you bastards?”
When
the shooting wrapped, he spent months in color correction to ensure
that every frame looked like a photograph by Ansel Adams. In truth,
Cuarón never gave up on beauty; he has just subordinated that passion.
“If you begin with aesthetics, you begin with preconceptions about what
is beautiful,” he told me. “And in great art, it’s the reverse. It’s the
revolutions in language that create other aesthetic forms.”
Last
December, when Cuarón suspected that his mother might not live much
longer, he held a private screening of “Roma” for her, Rodríguez and his
three siblings in Mexico City. When it finished, Rodríguez and his
mother were both crying. That’s how things were, his mother later told him. So many things. That’s how it was.
She died this March. But Rodríguez still binds the family together. “We
all share everything,” she told me. “We are all in the same boat. In
good times and in bad, like the weddings say. That’s how it was and
that’s how it will be.” She and her daughter, Adriana, who designed the
title and credits for “Roma,” live with Cuarón’s sister and her daughter
in his mother’s old house.
One evening as we sat in Pietrasanta, surrounded by the white noise of Italians enjoying aperitivi, Cuarón explained why going back to Mexico to make “Roma” felt different from going back for “Y Tu Mamá También.”
The first time, he felt unsure of his abilities as an artist, as a
director. By “Roma,” those old insecurities were gone. More than once,
when he told cast and crew all the elements they would need to
coordinate for a long take, they stared at him in disbelief. But he knew
that he could do it. “Roma” may not look like any of Cuarón’s previous
films, but he didn’t make it to reinvent himself as a director. “This
was no longer a question of film,” he told me. “It was a question of
life.”
Though he didn’t understand it
as he composed the screenplay, he later realized that the urgent need
he felt to do this film stemmed from a need to reclaim, and to come to
terms with, his own identity. “For almost a decade I lived in that
chimera of cosmopolitanism,” he told me. “And I do believe that we are
all citizens of the world, but if you’re not centered and deeply rooted
in a cultural identity, then that cosmopolitanism turns infertile.” One
of Cuarón’s greatest themes is the tension between the individual and
the environment. His movies can be read as studies in how what we do is
shaped by where we live. In “Roma,” he turned that approach on himself.
“The film confronted me with the mystery of what I no longer am yet
still am at the same time,” he said.
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Mexico
has also changed and not changed since the 1970s. “Now I go back to
Mexico, and I almost envy the young people,” he said. “Mexico is
exuberant, full of life, very creative.” The changes, he thinks, have to
do with the arrival of the internet and the end of the PRI’s political
monopoly. Yet many of the miseries of the 1970s endure. In 2014, 43
students from a teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa disappeared. Three film
students disappeared in Jalisco this past March. Social mobility remains
dismal. “Roma” speaks to the present through the past.
Still,
cycles can be broken. The last day that I saw Cuarón, he received an
urgent text. “Hold on,” he told me. His eyes lit up with amusement as he
understood the situation. His 13-year-old son had forgotten his
computer at home. Could Dad run and fetch it before he needed it for
class? Cuarón had been up until 2 the night before, preparing “Roma” for
Mexico’s Morelia film festival and going through page proofs of a
companion book of photographs published by Assouline. Every time I saw
him, he looked like a man badly in need of a good night’s sleep. Yet he
turned to me without a trace of irritation: Would I mind?
We
set off at a brisk walk past the sculptures in the plaza, then down a
narrow street crowded with art galleries and shops. At the door of his
building, I waited outside while he dashed upstairs. (The apartment, he
explained previously, was a no-go zone for media.) Inside the foyer of
the school, Cuarón stumbled momentarily between languages. Then he found
the words he needed in Italian to shoulder the blame for his son. “I’ve
accidentally taken Olmo’s computer,” he told the administrator. “I
thought it was mine, and he missed it.” The woman smiled. Va bene.
Outside the school, Cuarón looked unexpectedly refreshed. He observed
the street, the green hillside, the glorious golden morning light, and
relaxed into a smile. “Now,” he said, “everything’s fine.”
Marcela Valdes is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote about the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 50 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Revisionary. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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