The help

Roma (d. Alfonso Cuaron)

Raiding the vocabulary of Italian neorealism, Cuaron’s love letter to 70s Mexico City is delightful to behold visually but equally easy to shrug off as a melodrama. As a melodrama about the indigenous maid, the film falls flat because we don’t really get to see her, fully. She is a plaything to show off Cuaron’s liberal politics. Yet when the moment when she explodes, Cuaron mutes her frustrations with a treacly and improbable scene of inter-class and inter-ethnic solidarity–which is far more preposterous than Sandra Bullock as an astronaut. The film is a melodrama of the upper class who, despite harsh words towards the help, is ever so generous and benevolent at least in front of the camera. We’re offered a few possibilities to understand and piece together the racialized, economic and political antagonisms of the 70s era Mexico but they remain unresolved or partially touched on moments in the film. Some of the images are spectacular that I could imagine Bolano’s Mexico City in The Savage Detectives mixed in with my own faint memories of 80s Manila. So evocative. But these images are just that pretty images, camera technique, in short, distractions, like the dog shit that litters the garage, from what it truly is, a class-laden nostalgia for rich white folks.

#2018 #8