it Turns out that the film is also like a box. Not so says the mother of Forrest Gump and the chocolates have nothing to do. Says the director, Alfonso Cuarón, stealing the simile of a friend and companion of profession: “Guillermo del Toro says there are movies that correspond to a wrapper full of grain; I’ll eat it all for the promise of the gift that you are going to find you.” In your case, put on his boots in 2013 with Gravity: Hollywood, the deep space, the 3D, million budget and fundraising, Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, seven Oscar. “After, I was offered big movies, with stars, more money, and other more personal projects, but always in a certain context. I did not have to do that, but to go back to Mexico to film the work that should have been done since decades”, he says. After the eating binge, it was time to collect the prize. At the bottom of the empty box, he hoped, to Rome.
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“The Oscar [he won the best direction and editing, along with Mark Sanger] is fantastic, but even more to its side effects. Allowed Me to achieve both security as well as the resources to shoot a film in black-and-white, in Spanish and mixtec, in my country,” described the filmmaker (Mexico City, 1961) a group of journalists in September at the Venice film festival, where Rome was the Golden Lion. And began a tour of applause for half the world, so much so that it is regarded as the favorite for the statuettes of 2019. The film’s most personal and difficult of the director of Children of men or y tu mamá también is poised to become the most successful. Missing, however, the verdict of the public: Rome premieres in only a handful of cinemas —in the Verdi, in Madrid and Barcelona, from Wednesday 5— and from Friday, 14, debuts online: waiting for the 125 million users of Netflix.
In the big and small screens, there will be present only the talent of the mexican. He has written, directed and edited the film, but its footprint is much more profound: Rome is his life, as real as the furniture from your home that make up the set. 10 years ago that Cuaron dreamed of filming the story of his childhood. And, above all, of Liboria Rodríguez, Libo, the nana mixtec who lives in his house and his soul since he was nine months. “The DNA of the film always had three pillars indisputable: focus on Cleo (the alter-ego of Libo), one of the human beings I love the most; I would speak of my memory, in a very literal way; and it would be in black-and-white,” explains Cuarón. Finally, he added, the secrecy, filming in chronological order and desvelaba the script to the performers little by little, and only larger features. At times it even misled on purpose to achieve reactions more authentic, as recognized by Yalitza Aparicio, the rookie that came out of an indigenous village and climbed the castings up to the role of Cleo.
Well, the camera follows the nana in your day-to-day: taking care of home and children of a bourgeois family. The cleaning, the homework, the patience and the smile, from dawn Kolaybet to dusk. The first to rise, last to go to bed. One of the Cuarón Orozco and, however, never like them. “I talked a lot with Libo. I forced myself to watch it all from your perspective, to see it not as a model but through the reality, its triple pressure woman, of lower class and indigenous origin that live in a social and economic environment is totally different,” explains the director. Around Cleo, in addition, Cuaron shows a family and a whole country. How to move. And how they collapse.
Rome speaks of the Mexico of 1970, of what no longer is but also of what never was. The cine Las Americas, which hechizaba the small Cuaron, today it is a shopping center. The machismo, inequality and social hypocrisy, however, have taken root, along with the violence. The own recording equipment suffered from the aggression of municipal authorities during the filming. And the memory of the paramilitaries, the massacre of the Thursday of Corpus in 1971, is also kept alive in every mexican.
expand photo A frame of ‘Roma’. Carlos Somonte AP
To all this, Rome adds another debate, that of his native land, travels to the rest of the world. Because your distributor is the main colossus audio-visual Internet. And Netflix provides creators with millions and freedom, but requires you to respect your formula golden ratio: the priority is the online premiere, which sometimes adds a handful of rooms. Cuarón himself has made the Roma pass (briefly) by the movie theaters, and believes that that is the way it is “optimal” to enjoy it. However, it adds: “There are people who no longer go to the movies and I want you to also see it. The journey of a film, in any case, just as in much later and far from the rooms. Most of the masterpieces that I love most I have seen on the big screen”. To Rome seems to wait the same fate.
More cinemas in Poland than in Mexico or Spain
Cuaron trusted to Twitter, the past November 20, a mixture of anger and disappointment: “I Want many more features in Mexico, we have all the rooms that we have been able to achieve that, sadly, are 40. To put things in perspective, Poland will be showcased in 57 rooms and in South Korea in 50. Rome is available to all the clubs who want to exhibit”. The director has turned personally to inform about the route of the film in their country, announced a free screening and even published an e-mail to write him any cinema interested.
Responded on all small rooms, and independent. But the two main chains of the country, Cinepolis and Cinemex, the masters of the 90% of the movie theaters, have given back to Rome. Or, rather, to Netflix. Something similar happens with the two giants of the exhibition Spanish (Helmet, property of Cinepolis, and Cinesa), not in theaters. In Spain estranará only in five rooms: two in Madrid, other so Barcelona and another one in Málaga.
In a statement, Cinepolis stressed that the Netflix model is opposite to that of the cinema, and harmful to them: do not think to welcome a film which shortly after will be online and require 90 days between the release and physical on the Network. Against this, Cuaron emphasized that Netflix itself has made a concession unheard-of —in Mexico, like in New York or Los Angeles, Rome came to the meeting three weeks before to the Internet; The ballad of Buster Scruggs, of the Coens, for example, only had seven days— and criticized the inaction of the big chains.
