Even a black-and-white, Spanish-language Netflix film has a shot when it’s the work of the ‘Gravity’ filmmaker.
NEW YORK — “Roma” is one of the very best films you’re likely to see this year. But how far can it go in a jam-packed 2019 Oscar race?
That’s the question awards prognosticators have been asking ever since the movie premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in August and brought audiences to their feet at the Toronto and Telluride fests. It screens at the Chicago International Film Festival on Tuesday.
On paper, “Roma” has almost everything working against it: For starters, it’s a black-and-white, Spanish-language drama with English subtitles. The two-hour-plus film has no recognizable stars in the United States and charts a year in the life of a live-in maid named Cleo (played by Yalitza Aparicio, a first-time actress), who works for an upper-middle-class family in 1970s Mexico. It will be released Dec. 14 in select theaters and on Netflix, which until “Mudbound” and “Icarus” last year has struggled to be taken seriously by Oscar voters.
But “Roma” has a silver bullet in Alfonso Cuaron, the visionary filmmaker behind 2013’s “Gravity,” whose credits also include “Children of Men,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Cuaron, 56, has long been beloved by critics and industry peers as one of Hollywood’s “Three Amigos” along with fellow Mexican directors Alejandro G. Inarritu (“Birdman”) and Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”).
He has described “Roma” as his most deeply personal film yet, developed from his own memories growing up in Mexico City and based on his childhood baby sitter.
“We were a family together,” Cuaron told reporters in Venice of the woman who inspired Cleo. “When you grow up with someone you love, you don’t discuss their identity. So for this film, I forced myself to see as this woman, a member of the lower classes, from the indigenous population.… This gave me a point of view I had never had before.”
“Roma” has been hailed as an “epic, personal masterpiece” and Cuaron’s “best film so far” by critics, with 98 percent positive reviews on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. The movie has been selected as Mexico’s foreign-language Oscar submission; pundits from The Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire already are predicting that “Roma” could be the rare movie to earn nominations for both best picture and best foreign language film.
Festival-goers also have embraced the quietly devastating drama. There was not a dry eye in the house by the end of its New York Film Festival screening at Lincoln Center earlier this month, which was introduced by surprise guest del Toro in Cuaron’s absence.
” ‘Roma’ is, for me, the culmination of Alfonso’s career so far,” del Toro said. “When I first saw the movie, I said to him: ‘This is not only your best movie, it’s one of my top five [favorite] movies of all time. But don’t get big-headed; it’s No. 5.’ “
