Roma’s Cinematography Wowed Me
The direction of Alfonso Cuarón’s cinematography in Roma is nothing short of awe-inspiring. When I began to trace the way the camera not only captured Cleo’s story, but shaped it into something calamitous and taut, riddled with precious openness and jaded nightmares, I was floored.
Roma’s 65mm film is finished in black-and-white, a visual effect that has consistently helped create a wistful aura in other works of art. Here, however, the atmosphere not only feels full of longing, it also feels abraded, in-between, forthcoming. The frames feel confident, adequately pared-down in their absence of color. They are agents of Cleo’s dreary existence. In the end, the monochrome reel contributed to a theme of absurdism in the film, a subtle suspicion that something was missing, which helped amplify the tensions and melancholy of Cleo’s daily trials. The “coldness” of these stark, icy tones supplants an eerie energy to the fervor of emotion we find in the facial expressions, the postures, the dialogue.
The camera work in Roma is an ultra-absorbent sponge thrilled to capture all while honoring the centrality of Cuarón’s protagonist. A recurring theme emerged: most of the shots were positioned at the backs of rooms, the edges of interiors. I watched architecture almost liquify back into its most pristine form, escaping praxis for the heartiness of its preliminary, idealistic sketch. I watched a conversation unfold over a dinner table in the midst of the decorations crowding the surrounding space. It felt wondrously bizarre to be able to keep track of all the bodies moving around in a room. In seeing the backs of heads or blurry side profiles through these removed points of view, I grew accustomed to a pervading sense of half-anonymity. The audience, sitting afar like this, has a total view. We may fixate on Cleo’s figure, her psychology, but the wider world’s visuals are our oyster, our personal observational study. Its details and accidental discoveries. And that’s what Roma partly is: a determined execution of third-person perspective that allows life to lay itself out upon itself. It was hesitant to disrupt the arena, and for that the actors’ performances felt vivid.
I am fond of the way the camera turns from side to side, ever-so-slowly, like a crane. Or a surveillance camera. The orbiting of the gaze is so deliciously complicated. As I watched, I changed my mind frequently about what I thought the camera was trying to do, what Cuarón perceived his role to be. Sometimes the filmmaker was scientific and, maybe, indifferent. Sometimes they were shy but fascinated. They were respectful in their isolation. Awed, perhaps. I’m not sure. But that was the beauty of it. The orbiting lens felt dreary and controlled and rational all at once, with its sweeping documentation, its series of panoramas that simultaneously honored humanity, architecture, and the natural world the same way it honored Cleo’s arc. Roma is beautiful because it is so in touch with its context, and in that sense values plurality. By employing a few consistent formal tools, it engaged multiplicity.
The fixedness of a scene’s base point felt poignant and poetic—we return, though slightly anew after widening the horizon, to the same spot in a single shot. This stillness invited me into a state of focus, sometimes with a feeling of urgency. Roma asked me to cultivate patience, which is incredibly refreshing given today’s media landscape of zippy editing. The screen was a sieve, catching marble-sized footsteps, plane whooshing, bird calls. I couldn’t help but imagine the camera’s movements were generated by the eyes of a person that somehow knew the space it was in yet kept on forgetting things about it. One that appreciated the lingering, the small dances scattered here and there. I didn’t find that recurring feeling to be repetitive. Ultimately, the swaying carried a consistent rhythm across the project and found energy in the reprise of imagery.
The scene in which Cleo runs, then begins to anxiously walk, on the sidewalk in the direction of the cinema in search of Toño and Beto instantly became one of my favorites. The camera stays with Cleo as she moves, rolling left with her, parallel against her profile, flattening her and emphasizing the agonizing continuation of her search. We capture dozens of bodies, a splash of rainwater from a storefront awning, clouds of smoke falling prey to wind. Without cutting, the shot captures every second of the wait for the streetlights to change, for permission to move forward. When she finds Toño, the camera still grasps information of the overlapping conversations and antics around them. Here, Cuarón turns urbanity into a warping conveyor belt, a rolling carpet stretching evermore, a mirage, almost. He doesn’t interrupt the thronging rush of city life, perhaps to underscore Cleo’s exigence. The cinematography here doesn’t invite us into any explicit etching of Cleo’s internal dialogue, but we still pick up more about who she is, her persistence and care.
The satisfyingly drawn-out shots and stills across Roma echo this same warbling aloneness and intermediary studying. One of the final scenes, in which Cleo dashes back to the ocean to save Paco and Sofi from drowning, is another manifestation of this anticipatory, comprehensive style of narrative-building. We glide as an audience. We skate back and forth across environments. This way of using the camera, in theory, seems heartless, but in Roma, it tugs perfectly at the grittiest parts of the story’s progression, finding an uncanny, formidable, and thrillingly detached space for us to sit in and scour and relish and contemplate.