Malignant critics suggested the president of the 75th Venice International Film Festival jury Guillermo del Toro may have had a soft spot for Mexican film "Roma", directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Last Saturday evening when the film was awarded the Golden Lion, such critics probably thought that, after all, they had seen it coming from the early days of the festival.
Yet "Roma" didn't really need any recommendation to win the prestigious award since it is essentially a Neorealist film and, in the country that created the genre, it seemed a great option for a Golden Lion.
The plot, Cuarón stated in interviews, was inspired by his childhood: the story takes place indeed in the '70s, in an upper-middle class home in the "Colonia Roma" district, Mexico City.
Life is seen through the eyes and personal experiences of a young housemaid of Mixteco heritage (the movie includes both Spanish and Mixtec dialogue), Cleo.
Domestic life and politics merge and combine as the film unravels: Cleo is surrounded by other characters who act like satellites gravitating around her, from her martial arts obsessed boyfriend Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) to the members of the family where she works - elusive Dr Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) away on business trips, his stressed wife Sofía (Marina de Tavira) and their four children.
In the first part there isn't a lot of dialogue and the film has got an episodic rhythm, then the director juxtaposes one scene to the other, creating unspoken connections and a game of correspondences: the domestic crisis that Sofia is going to face is announced by an earthquake, but also reflected in a political turbulent scene that evokes the Corpus Christi Massacre that took place in June 1971 when around 120 people were killed by the military during a student demonstration.
Scenes are carefully shot and the film is in surreally muted black and white tones (that often give to it the impression you're look at a vision) interspersed with metallic grey shades.
The real star of this memory play remains Cleo, played by non-professional lead Yalitza Aparicio – in real life a teacher. Cleo is a porous ghost-like character, she absorbs the energy of those around her: she cooks, cleans and takes care of the children and she seems to have a passion for humbly and silently observing all the other characters. Cleo represents the liminality, the periphery that crosses boundaries and takes centre stage.
Conclusions may not be too unexpected, but the film is not so focused on the plot, it could be indeed taken as a meditation about memories filtered via the lives of the women it portrays.
Memories are woven around precise shots that in some cases do not echo Italian Neorealism and Vittorio De Sica, but point at Fellini with "Amarcord"-like scene (there are other Fellini-esque moments - from the fire in the forest that features an interlude with a man in a costume singing, to Cleo's expedition to look for Fermín or the shot in which Cleo, Sofía and the children, all silent and sad, have an ice-cream under the shadow of a surreal giant crab, while behind them a cheerful wedding party is taking place) and at Antonioni for the architectural shots like the opening scene with the ornate diamond stone pattern that is actually the humble driveway of the family house, perennially covered in the poop of the family dog.
Antonioni's ghost also appears in the lack of communication between the characters and in the sentence pronounced by Señora Sofia - "Women, we're on our own!" - a sort of summary of the female condition.
Cleo, seduced and abandoned by Fermín, already knows it, though, so her employer's discovery is nothing new, but the confirmation of her own experiences.
"Roma" (that, by the way, will be distributed by Netflix) becomes therefore a tribute to the women who helped raise the director as Cuarón highlighted in interviews.
Women are protagonists of another film that took part in the Venice Film Festival, but that didn't get any awards, "Suspiria" by Luca Guadagnino, a remake of Dario Argento's iconic horror story.
Rumoured to happen 8 years ago when Silvia Venturini Fendi's production house First Sun bought the rights for the remake, the film was finally shot last year.
The story has been re-shifted and changed in some points: the action takes place in 1977 in West Berlin where young Susie (Dakota Johnson) arrives at a dance school. She gets an audition and wins a spot at the prestigious academy ruled by a Pina Bausch-like character, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), and by seldom seen dame and ancient witch Helena Markos (Tilda Swinton). Susie soon realises, though, that there's something else going on behind the walls of the school.
Guadagnino loves refined atmospheres and in this case he left behind the gory super fake reds of Dario Argento (that actually made the film famous) and his mesmerising geometries in favour of a decadent atmosphere that at times evokes the ghosts of "Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo". The director looked at Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and then collaged together a series of choreographers from the obsessive and charismatic fictional ballet impressario Boris Lermontov in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's "The Red Shoes", to real artists such as Pina Bausch, Martha Graham, Mary Wigman (her "Hexentanz" - The Witch Dance - inspires the main choreography in the film) and Sasha Waltz.
Anxiety-inducing, but lacking passion and inducing boredom, repackaged with a trendy soundtrack by Thom Yorke (nothing like the annoyingly mesmerising music by Goblin), the film drags on for two-and-a-half hours, mainly dominated by Swinton who also plays Dr. Jozef Klemperer, an old German psychiatrist (the fake bio says the role is played by actor Lutz Ebersdorf and the joke continued during a press conference in Venice in which Swinton and Guadagnino took the piss out of a journalist...), investigating the death of his wife Anke (played in a cameo by Jessica Harper).
In Argento's film there was no final show, but mainly dance lessons, while here we have a proper choreography (by Damien Jalet): Madame Blanc is preparing her dance piece "Volk" in which dancers wear bright-red ropes hinting at dripping blood, tied around their bodies and evoking bondage (costume designer Giulia Piersanti is more or less annihilated by the amount of borrowed designer clothes in the film), in a choreography inspired by witches symbols with dance steps moving on the points of a pentagram.
There are intriguing moments such as the scene in which Susie dances, but her dance steps and movements in the studio end up torturing fellow student Olga (Elena Fokina) who is in the basement. Yet the horror is suffocated by psychotherapy and a plot burdened by too many ideas, details and subplots, including terrorism and the Baader-Meinhof group.
Guadagnino stated this film is about women's empowerment, female energy and, yes, the power of motherhood and matriarchy (an obsession of Argento as well and his Mother Suspiriorum, Mother Tenebrarum and Mother Lachryharum, the ancient witches that inspired his "Suspiria", "Inferno" and "The Mother of Tears" trilogy make a comeback here), but you seriously wonder if empowered women must always be portrayed as dysfunctional characters like witches, must hide under layers of latex and play an old man to prove their power or be directed by a male director.
In a way Guadagnino's "Suspiria" is a totally unnecessary film, the sort of super polished and extremely stylishly crafted movie (check out the grand subtitle "Six Acts and an Epilogue Set in a Divided Berlin") fashionistas will watch to spot designer clothes (there's plenty to see here, but it was a shame they didn't call Gucci's Alessandro Michele as costume designer as he's obsessed with Argento, so this would have made a perfect Gucci advert shot by Guadagnino...).
As for horror fans, well, this is not Argento nor Mario Bava, so if you miss this "Suspiria" you will be saved by conceptual boredom masquerading as female empowerment. In conclusion the pretentious witches in "Suspiria" do not manage to cast a spell like humble Cleo, who proves that, quite often, female empowerment manifests in unexpected ways, including mopping the shit on a driveway and, thankfully, the Venice Film Festival jury realised it.
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