Mur13ls Awards 2018 Twofer: Best Direction and Best Cinematography!

"There’s a scene in the middle of Roma when our heroine, Cleo, tracks down the faithless father of her unborn son to a huge martial arts training session where dozens of young men attempt to keep up with their instructors. One of the instructors strikes a pose that looks deceptively easy, but which none of the students are able to hold. In the back of them, Cleo holds the pose without effort. There’s a magical quality to this, suggesting that Cleo exists in a state of grace, and the film itself is indeed a hymn to her, drawing on director Alfonso Cuarón’s memories of his own childhood and his family’s own nanny/maid/whatever.

"But Cuaron is too savvy a filmmaker to leave this uncomplicated. Cleo is not a superheroine, and the film puts her through a grinding emotional arc. Another sequence, one that begins at a student protest that turns into a massacre and ends in a maternity ward drops the floor out from under her, and out from under us, the viewers. This sequence is recognizable as the work of the director of Gravity and Children of Men and like those films, this favors elaborate long-takes and complicated camera movement (orchestrated by Cuarón himself, who shot the film), and yes, it’s an impressive technical showcase from a director who doesn’t need to prove his technical bona fides anymore, but this is different. The emotional wreckage it leaves in its wake is the product of a filmmaker who has paid attention to the details without pointing signs at them. It’s a control freak’s movie, sure, but it never feels constrained by its director’s type-a cinematic tendencies, perhaps because it’s ultimately a picaresque. It’s generous with the audience, letting them find their own way into the film.

"Roma is a deeply mythological film, too, that connects Cleo with some primal elemental force that bridges Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The very first shot of the movie shows the sky and an airplane reflected on water, water Cleo is using to scrub the floor of the drive. She tracks down Fermin, her child’s father, to a vast field of dirt. There’s a forest fire at the celebration the family attends with their affluent friends. The film climaxes in the surf, before it bookends everything with Cleo ascending to the rooftop of the house, like she’s the mediator between the sky and the other elements.

"Roma strikes me as a throwback. It’s the kind of film that you might have seen back in the golden age of international films, back when titans walked the earth. The film it reminds me of most is Fellini’s Amarcord (even though it shares a title with a different Fellini film), and like that film, it’s a picaresque conjured up from the director’s memories of his own childhood. Unlike that film, this one is clear-eyed and merciless about the past. This is not a romantic longing for an earlier time, but rather a film that has a keen awareness of class, of the society in which it is set, and of the nature of families. It’s easy to see Cleo as a member of her family, but it’s clear that she is not fully so in scenes like the one where her employer gets on her about cleaning up the dog shit in their drive. If that relationship blurs as the film goes on, and if there’s a merging, that scene still remains as a rebuke. There’s a huge class divide between Cleo and Fermin, too, such that his abandonment of her is a rebuke to her social status. There’s also an awareness that men are often trash. There are no 'good' men in this film, which is surprising enough from a cis het male director, but the men that ARE in the film tend to be utter shits. This is one experience, at least, that Cleo shares with her employer.

"I could have listed several films as my favorite of the year--certainly 2018 was a year absolutely littered with legitimately great films--but the thing that tips my hand to this film in particular is the experience I had watching it. The circumstances of filmgoing are a huge influence on how one views a movie, and so it was with me and Roma. I saw it in a theater, which is probably a drastic difference from how most people will see the film going forward on Netflix. My own movie-going habits place me in the front row at most movies (my brothers hate this when they see movies with me, but I’m a creature of habit). From that vantage, I was completely immersed in the film. It dominated my sphere of perception. The world shrank to just me in my seat and the world of the film, and nothing else existed for the time that it unfolded in front of me. In my experience, that kind of immersion is rare. As much as I loved Burning and Shoplifters and If Beale Street Could Talk and a couple of dozen other films last year that I could have named as my favorite without regret, Roma is the only one that had so deep a transporting effect on me. That means something. To me, at least." ~ Christianne Benedict

This year's Best Direction "nominees:

Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Debra Granik, Leave No Trace

Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk

Lucrecia Martel, Zama

Paul Schrader, First Reformed

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This Year's Best Cinematography "nominees:"

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Bruno Delbonnel)

Cold War (Lukasz Zal)

If Beale Street Could Talk (James Laxton)

Mandy (Benjamin Loeb)

Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)

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