Oscar has been captured by the Mexican trio
Oscar has been captured by the "Mexico" three heroes.
In 2013, Alfonso Cuaron's "Gravity" already helped him win the Oscar for Best Director, 2014 "Birdman" by Alejandro Gonzalez Inaritu, 2016 Inaritu's "The Revenant" in 2018 and Guillermo del Toro's "The Shape of Water" in 2018, the trophies for the four best director Oscars in six years were exchanged back and forth in the hands of the three Mexican directors, forming a Latin American directors have successfully entered the heyday of Hollywood.
The film "Roma" is the new work of Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, and it was also the best film in the main competition unit of the 75th Venice Film Festival (won the Golden Lion Award). It's like a rainbow of momentum is completely different, the film itself is a gentle female elegy.
1. Reinventing Rome
Many critics say "Roma" is Alfonso Cuaron's "City of Sadness" (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), but I think he is more like Cuaron's "Once Upon a Time in Childhood". Cuaron himself is the model, describing the Indigenous nanny who took care of four white children, including himself, as a young child living on the streets of Rome in Mexico City. The nanny was abandoned by her boyfriend after she was pregnant. She went to the hospital examination room and was hit by a big earthquake. When she went to the supermarket, she was threatened with armed struggle and gave birth prematurely. The premature birth of the child is a still baby. The master shared the misery and saved the child who was about to be abused by the mistress, and finally moved towards a kind of reconciliation in the insipid.
This film gives filmmakers more possibilities, except for stalwart heroes, ordinary people in life that we should pay attention to. "Rome" is the old neighborhood where Cuarón once lived, but it was destroyed after the "Mexico City 85 Earthquake". The film spent a lot of money to rebuild several lost neighborhoods, just to depict the life silhouette of an aboriginal nanny. It's the feeling of a film writer and director.
2. Class dialogue and emotional harm
The heroine and the two nanny actors of the film are both amateurs, and the performances are real and natural, leaving no traces. The class differences and conflicts brought about by the master-servant relationship shown in the film also dissolve like still water in the gentle and bland black and white light and shadow, but they still penetrate into the details of life. In the film, the female host of the white family is a biology teacher, and the male host is a doctor. There are three boys and one girl and four children in the family, a typical middle-class family. Keliz was introduced to the house as a long-term nanny by her aboriginal friend who is also a maid. She is responsible for cleaning all corners of the family in addition to taking care of the four children. The workload can be described as not small. The film adopts a de-dramatic way of expression, and does not show too much conflict between master and servant, or the hostess's exploitation and conflict with the nanny. One of the few contradictions is that when the hostess loses his temper with the hostess because of the uncleaned shit in the house, the hostess, who doesn’t know where her husband is really going, throws her tantrum on the nanny; when the hostess and her husband quarrel over cheating incidents , the nanny was scolded for failing to stop the child who wanted to eavesdrop in time. The so-called "kick the cat" effect is probably like this, the people at the bottom of the family are always the punching bags at the top. Material deprivation has been seen frequently in many films about capital exploitation, whether it is the most straightforward and thorough expression of the suffering of aboriginal people in "The Revenant", or "Get Out"'s ironic satire on the plundering of black people by white people. They are the most intuitive manifestations of plundering from land money and even biological functions.
The film, on the other hand, depicts the emotional deprivation of the middle class and the passive acceptance of the aborigines very well. Keliz always passively accepts the suffering that life gives, which is also the epitome of the attitude of the aboriginal people to life at that time. Hearing her pregnant boyfriend at the movie theater, he expressed his happiness at first, but soon "Escape the Shell" and abandoned Cliz, who suffered from physical loneliness and emotional helplessness, and kept the children to eight without finding a boyfriend. month, and then when she was completely betrayed by her boyfriend, she could only passively give birth to a child. She never had her own will, who did not want children throughout the whole process, but passively accepted the arrival of a new life and even her death with the advice of her boyfriend, hostess, and obstetrician. The hostess's friendly and friendly attitude hides the hypocrisy and self-interest of the middle class. It is not out of human care for the babysitter that she brought Cliz to the hospital to check the condition of the fetus, but more to find a suitable reason to go to the hospital to ask the information of her husband's actual situation. Her self-interest-centricity is extremely clear in her rambunctious driving style on the road and the fact that she threw the babysitter directly to the doctor and turned to talk to her husband and colleagues. And when the heroine's husband cheated and the two separated, the heroine's emotional catharsis towards the children and Corlis undoubtedly pushed the surging drama conflict to a climax. "Now that the family has come to a difficult time, we need to face the suffering together", an emotional kidnapping deprivation, forcibly incorporating Kelise into the unity of family changes, but ignoring the family displacement and loss of children that Kelise suffered. The pain was more painful than her experience. I think of the "human blood steamed buns" provided by the rich second generation to Liu Yaren's Zhong Xiu in "Burning", as if the "spiritual giving" and "spiritual deprivation" of the middle class to the bottom are natural, and the passive acceptance of the weak also forms a collective unconscious.
In addition, the film's de-drama is also reflected in the hidden sense of age into life. There was a big earthquake in Mexico when Corlis was looking at the baby room. The stones that fell on the nursery box were connected with the tombstone footage of a large number of people who died due to the big earthquake, suggesting the misfortune of the hostess and the child; Liz's friends chatted with her about the expropriation of her mother's land in the countryside, implicitly expressing the theme of the gradual decline of Aboriginal land and the disappearance of Aboriginal groups; student movements and rights movements, and armed with rebels The struggles are all placed on the way of the female protagonist on the way to buy vegetables. In the torrent of the big era, nanny like Corlis, or ordinary people, their limited cultural knowledge and spiritual level limit their recognition of the world. Knowing and emotional needs, they passively accept, endure pain, and even feel that life should be like this.
3. Analysis of image symbols
The film has a lot of recurring imagery symbols.
The most prominent one is the dog shit. At the beginning of the film, the soapy water like a wave washes the floor and cleans the shit, but it is endless. Was scolded many times by the hostess. The appearance of dog shit is because the dog is not free. The dogs in the family are always in a "high jump" state at the door. They are eager to get out of the door, and even sneak out once but are dragged home by the little owner. The "dog shit" that can't be cleaned up may be a kind of rebellion of the dog against the state that comes out. It is even more helpless and pitiful that Corlis's unconsciousness has no way to fight.
And the "scumbag" character of the film also focuses on showing the harm that irresponsible men do to women, whether it is the derailment of a middle-class doctor or the betrayal of a man who dances a gun and makes a stick, or even two boys arguing and fighting to the family window Forced destruction - the harm that men bring to women because of their recklessness, impulsiveness and self-righteousness needs to be healed by women themselves.
The distant streets of Rome, Mexico, have been submerged in the torrent of history, and the indigenous peoples have been assimilated into the waves of world colonialism.
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