If Federico Fellini hadn’t already used the title “Amarcord,” which is “I Remember” in Italian, the Mexican-born writer-director Alfonso Cuaron might’ve been tempted to call his latest remarkable picture something like “Recuerdo.”
Instead he went with “Roma,” referring to the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City. The title also hints at ancient empires going the wrong way as a society. The film unfolds as a steady, teeming series of detailed panoramas brought to life, recalling Cuaron’s Mexico City childhood. His story, fictionalized semiautobiography, deals with the months before and mostly after the on-screen parents’ separation. The central role of the indigenous live-in servant, Cleo, who quietly takes care of everyone’s crises, is played by schoolteacher and first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio. The film is a beauty.
Cuaron says he has been compelled to make “Roma” since 2006. But I’m not sure I believe him. An evocation of the past this visually rigorous and accomplished comes together only if the filmmaker has been reliving his memories for the entirety of his life, not just a few years of it.
Backed by Netflix, due for a limited theatrical release as well as streaming starting Dec. 14, “Roma” made its North American premiere Monday as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. It recalls unstable times, both inside the home and outside. The father has met another woman, and the mother is lying to her children about their father’s whereabouts (she says he’s doing research in Quebec). Meantime, trouble is brewing on a larger scale.
Cuaron includes a scene of the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre conducted by the military, killing an estimated 120 amid a student demonstration in Mexico City. We witness the massacre at a remove, through the window of a furniture store. The physical, tactile quality of the scenes, dense with exquisitely blended sounds (street vendors, crickets, always another dog, barking), is a marvel of scenic construction and digital effects working in harmony.
“Roma” was photographed digitally in widescreen black and white, with Cuaron acting as his own cinematographer. The dialogue is spoken in Spanish and, by the servants, Mixteco. The events are casually momentous, or would feel that way in another director’s hands. An earthquake strikes Mexico City while Cleo, pregnant and abandoned by her sometime lover, visits a maternity ward. A forest fire disrupts a New Year’s Eve gathering among the louche gringo relatives. A beach excursion edges right up to the shore of tragedy.
Yet Cuaron treats each segment of “Roma” from its own expansive vantage point, allowing his vignettes to take on lives of their own, at their own speed.
Cuaron shot “Roma” mostly in sequence, he said Monday on stage, and never showed the actors a shooting script. He made use of a generous and costly 108-day shooting schedule, two, three or even four times as long as the average American picture.
“I didn’t want to be second-guessed,” said the director, whose earlier features amount to a relatively short list: “Solo con Tu Pareja” (1991), the wondrous road trip picture “Y Tu Mama Tambien” (2001), “Children of Men” (2006) and his big commercial hit, “Gravity” (2013).
This is the year Netflix dominated the international festival circuit, opening its checkbook to such well-regarded filmmakers such as Cuaron, the Coen brothers (“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” a sardonic sextet of Old West fables) and Paul Greengrass. The latest Greengrass docudrama, “22 July” (available Oct. 10), examines the horrific Norwegian massacre waged by far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik.
The killings take up the first half-hour. Then Grassgrass, to mixed results, splits his focus between Breivik’s trial (he was determined to be tried as a sane man) and the grueling recovery of one teenager severely injured in the assault.
“There’s a lot of fear and anger out there,” a far-right nationalist says at one point in “22 July,” explaining how and why something like the 2011 massacre could happen. The line says too much and not enough, simultaneously. The movie’s not dull, but it wields its topicality like a sledgehammer. It’s as far from the concerns of “Roma” as a film can be and still belong to the same storytelling medium.
I caught the first half of the Toronto festival straight off the first few days of the Venice Film Festival, a gathering fully dominated by the presence of Netflix. (At Venice “Roma” received the top prize from a jury headed by, ahem, Cuaron’s pal Guillermo del Toro.) Many titles screened at those festivals and at Telluride now make their way to a new wave of regional affairs, including the Chicago International Film Festival.
Opening the Chicago fest Oct. 10: “Beautiful Boy,” director Felix Van Groeningen’s film based on two intimately related memoirs written by a father, journalist David Sheff, and his son, Nic. The latter struggled, and nearly died, after years of crystal meth addiction. The film, one of several rehab and recovery stories seen at Toronto, stars Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet. No word yet whether either actor will be traveling to Chicago when “Beautiful Boy” opens the Chicago festival, two days before its commercial wide release.
Two warmly reviewed Toronto offerings likewise now hit Chicago, for gala screenings. First comes director George Tillman Jr.’s “The Hate U Give” (Oct. 11). It’s a strong, fully felt drama. In a different key, so is director/co-writer Steve McQueen’s ripping Chicago-set pulp thriller “Widows” (Oct. 13). Other noteworthy Toronto selections coming to Chicago include Matteo Garrone’s true-crime drama “Dogman,” set in a southern Italian seaside town and featuring a note-perfect performance from Marcello Fonte, a living, breathing Modigliani painting, as the kindly dog groomer who becomes enmeshed in the local underworld.
There are many more Toronto-to-Chicago titles, not all of them success stories; “Peterloo,” for example, is a rare misstep from filmmaker Mike Leigh, dealing in uncharacteristically plodding fashion with the 1819 British cavalry massacre on reform-minded citizens of Manchester, England.
Leigh, God knows, can be forgiven after so much interesting work. Festival-going proves it, time and again: Filmmakers who succeed every time probably aren’t risking enough.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
