Remembrance as Reconstruction EXCAVATING MEMORY IN ROMA
It’s a film about a family, a city and a country, but ultimately it’s about humanity. I wanted to make a film that was both intimate and universal – a film that speaks to everyone. My hope is that, in some way, Roma connects with you and your past, with your memory.
– Alfonso Cuarón1
How equipped is the language of cinema to articulate the nuances of memory? The breadth and scope of accumulated experience, the density of stored images, sensations and sounds? And what of those faltering, time-breached memories that elude capture, and that take on the subtle contours of lived experience as they evolve? This tension between our recollection of the places, people and events that define us and their material reality is at the beguiling heart of Roma (Cuarón, 2018). The film is largely autobiographical: it is shaped by writer/director Cuarón’s recollections of his childhood in Mexico City, and in particular of the two women who presided over his formative years – Liboria ‘Libo’ Rodriguez, a Mixtec woman who worked as his family’s live-in maid, and Cristina Orozco, his mother. The film’s title refers to Colonia Roma, the neighbourhood of Mexico City where they lived.2
The Mexican auteur who gave us the full-voltage 3D(2013) changes gears here, moving from blockbuster to art film with impressive dexterity. Despite the two films’ generic differences, the director’s fingerprint is still in evidence in : there is the painstakingly crafted minutiae of an authentically ‘lived-in’ diegetic world, and there are also the virtuoso technical set pieces, in which the camera floats through time and space, at once distant from and very much a part of the city’s aesthetic register. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, is a film that tends to resonate just as rousingly with critics as it does with arthouse and mainstream audiences. Interestingly, its distribution schedule reflects this broad-ranging appeal: following a limited theatrical run, it was released on streaming service Netflix. The fallout was thunderous – the Cannes Film Festival’s own rules prevented them from screening , bringing the ongoing debate about ‘the death of cinema’ into sharp focus – but ultimately short-lived, and the decision paid dividends: despite the Cannes snub, went on to become the most awarded film of 2018, winning the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion and the Academy Award for Best Director (among other accolades) and topping the prestigious year-end poll of critics and curators. Undoubtedly, the film ended up being viewed by a far more diverse audience than a conventional cinematic release would have permitted. The rise of streaming platforms and what it means for the future of cinema is a really vital discussion that far exceeds the scope of this article, but it’s worth noting that Cuarón believes that the spaces shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. He hopes that ‘the combination of the two worlds is going to create something very interesting’.
