Roma's Wounding Confession
churchlife.nd.edu
churchlife.nd.edu
It is a cultural thing that is probably left over from the colonization era. Things will change but it takes time.
He being an American of generally liberal persuasion tried, as your family did, to treat the cook and gardener as 'equals'.
Over time that changed though. One day the maid sat him down and politely explained that it was sort of insulting to be treated too familiar in this context. She was speaking of the gardener and said, "What you are doing makes him feel very uncomfortable". She explained, "the old man there is kneeling in your garden pulling weeds 8 hours a day, and you come home...breeze in in your 50K auto and ask him if he wants to share a beer with you..."
He realized she was right. These people were not "passionate about their career", in fact there was no career, nor even the semblance of it. They were just doing whatever possible work they could do to earn enough money to keep food on their families table. Treating them too familiar, or even implying they shared lots of things in common, was sort of demeaning.
In the end, he wound up treating them very formally. "Sr Veracruz" "Sra Sanchez" etc...always keeping a sort of respectful distance between them. Posting work schedules, etc and generally treating them like employees.
I'm not at all against what you said, nor implying you guys didn't do what was right, simply showing there are more than one interpretation of such situations.
in china, nanny's are generally relatives. the grandparents, an aunt or a cousin. so they are part of the family. they are there because they are genuinely needed to share the work, there is no class difference. only when relatives are not available, someone else is hired, but their status is not much different.
Assuming you are paying a fair salary, other cultures/countries don't have a housekeeper (even as a part-time work) because they cannot afford one not because it is an ethical or moral thing. In general, families with children need a lot of extra help when parents work.
I used to have a maid come in for about 4 hours once a week. She'd do all of our laundry, clean the house, wash whatever dishes were dirty, etc. She had a number of customers like us, plus one that'd pay her a set amount per month to come every day for a couple hours a day and clean/cook dinner. She was making about R$2,000 a month plus her retirement. It was a pretty decent amount, when a good salary for people my age was around R$3,000.
Here in Brazil (perhaps specially in the older Northeast, where I'm from) having a maid is still very strong but has changed considerable in the past two decades.
It used to be the case that these maids would work for a family for decades without any of the guarantees that Brazilian work laws guarantee. Whether or not one agrees with those laws is secondary to the fact that these workers were largely kept out of it for ages.
It used to also be the case that families would require maids to sleep in the house. Woman who had their own family often had to accept spending nights on their "patrões" home to make sure they were there ready to work at 6am.
> That effacement of Cleo’s character, her reduction to a bland and blank trope that burnishes the director’s conscience while smothering her consciousness and his own, is the essential and crucial failure of “Roma.” It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/theres-a-voi...
It's this way with all the characters. They're all shallow, one-dimensional tropes you're never given any reason to care about. Except for the domestic servants, they're all unlikeable.
Worse, I found the film outright boring (I say this as someone who loves Barry Lyndon).
The scene shown on the movie poster that I gather is supposed to have a big emotional impact, just left me feeling manipulated. It's telegraphed to you from a mile away, and then the family claiming they love the maid, it just isn't believable given how they've ignored her and mostly treated her like crap.
Speaking of crap, the dog shit. Why the hell was that so important to Cuarón that he features it, what, a dozen times?
Finally, I really didn't care for the B&W combined with digital. The overall effect just looked contrived to me. (I watched it on 100" screen with a calibrated JVC D-ILA projector, so I think I viewed it pretty close to how the director intended.)
If you want to see a brilliant 2018 film about the human condition and a family dealing with trying circumstances, watch Shoplifters instead. I viewed Roma and Shoplifters the same evening. I'm so glad I watched the latter and wish I could have my two hours back from the former.
TL;DR: Roma sucks, watch Shoplifters instead. Or Tokyo Story if you want to see Roma done right.
> It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.
The assumption here is that Cuarón should've made the film about Cleo, by giving her a voice and explaining to us her point of view... when maybe Cuarón might be trying to show us how he was unable to really understand this person who had a very rich life outside of his world. If Cuarón's experience was always defined by a very simple interface (that of the "sirvienta" or "mucama"), then it's understandable that his version of her is a muted - one could say desaturated - version of the real person.
> ...and then the family claiming they love the maid, it just isn't believable given how they've ignored her and mostly treated her like crap.
Most families' relationships with their maids is super weird. My family was never affluent enough to afford one, but I had plenty of friends who had a "sirvienta" (the Argentine equivalent of Cleo's role). To the kids, the sirvienta was a second mother, to the parents the sirvienta was a friend, psychiatrist and help. All of them would talk fondly of their sirvientas as if they were part of the family... to an extent. If a sirvienta falls in hard times (be it health, money or otherwise), the family doesn't usually offer to help.
In other words, as long as the sirvienta is in the house, she's part of the family. The moment she leaves, she's just an stranger they didn't really care that much for. Very strange.
> Speaking of crap, the dog shit. Why the hell was that so important to Cuarón that he features it, what, a dozen times?
I think this is Cuarón's rendering of the kind of things that imprint on you as a kid. I remember my first time walking around La Boca, in Buenos Aires, after living abroad for a few years. The amount of dog shit on the sidewalk was staggering. I was surprised, even though I grew up less than an hour away from there. I could see myself remembering the dog shit had I grown up in La Boca.
That's just rationalizing away the fact that the film's subject was poorly handled by the film's director. Someone else - and I'm not suggesting that has to be someone whose experiences more closely map to Cleo's - could have told this story better, or at least in a way that would have felt less out of touch.
The film was pretty beautiful but dramatically, a miss.
I wish I had seen way more about the ship that comes and picks up the baby and her mother at the end of Children of Men... but the movie wasn't about them.
My upset with Roma was given how critically acclaimed it is, I was expecting a lot more. I appreciate your perspective but I still don’t think the film is worthy of the praise it’s been given. I went and read a ton of reviews after to try to understand what I might be missing and I just ended up getting more and more annoyed. Oh well.
Speaking of Great Gatsby, I did enjoy Burning.
The Princess Bride... now that’s a classic.
Well, I cried like a baby at the scene at the beach.
I think there's immense value in being able to engage with something creative (whether it's music, film, poetry, performance) at this level, and I honestly feel sadness for people who never give it a chance.