Roma

I don't think I've ever seen a film with so many long scenes depicting active lives lived enriched with such vivid detail.

They aren't as multifaceted as those found at the beginning of Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine or Robert Altman's The Player or Orson Welles's Touch of Evil, but they continue to illustrate throughout the entire film and create a visually stunning communal aesthetic thereby, without moving, without moving hardly at all.

It's like Roma has thought provoking characters but they're secondary to the scene, the setting, the environment, like they're a part of a larger world, something much more subtle than that they're enveloped within, subtle yet pervasive, its predicaments and accidents adding pronounced depth without diagnosing psychology, as if their personalities are changing and growing within a fluid diverse realm whose endemic features encourage comment sans judgment, like the world's too vast to be analytically classified, and laissez-faire semantics breach like relaxed ontologies.

Living within.

Held together by a family's nanny (Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo) and the difficulties that arise after she discovers she's pregnant, a support network securely in place which is severely contrasted by blunt negligence, Roma follows her as she takes care of a family while trying to start one of her own, chaotic embodiments of structure ignoring her gentle inquiries.

The urge to classify, to make definitive political sense of life so that one can practically attach theoretical logic to their behaviour and be consequently rewarded or punished, depending on how virtuously they're deemed to have acted, functions like haunting destructive shackles within, inasmuch as it's speculatively associated with dogma, dogma which attempts to clarify, curtail, and control, violently, rather than existing symbiotically in peace.

Cleo's love interest Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) is therefore given an extended self-absorbed scene where he demonstrates his prowess, its stark lack of detail, its animated ferocious thrusts, bluntly contrasting the otherwise curious more robust less volatile shots, as if to intimate shocking austere extremities.

It's not the codes themselves that ironically produce chaos, it's the rigid discriminate attempts to puritanically follow them, even in situations where they clearly don't fit, and make others follow them, or classify others who don't follow them as undesirable, monitoring everyone at all times to make sure they're following them, bellicosely asserting them when faced with opposition, that make extremist variations on composed ethical themes like the ones found in Roma so terrifying.

Roma's a patient thoughtfully cultivated poised undulating ethos, whose undefined compassionate caresses humbly lament tragic imagination.

Calmly blending the search for meaning with unrehearsed existence, it finds purpose through improvisation, and critiques determinate codes.

Reminded me of Solaris.