The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alfonso Cuarón · a film in Spanish and Mixtec · 2018 · about 135 minutes · written, directed and photographed by Alfonso Cuarón
Mode
Domestic chronicle and memory film; a servant’s year, with history arriving at the door
Mythos
Water as one element of life and death; the nurse as the house’s second mother, set at the centre; a birth through the sea by a woman who has just lost a child
Phase
One year in a household of Colonia Roma, from about 1970 to mid 1971, through the New Year at a hacienda, the massacre of 10 June 1971 and a journey to the coast at Tuxpan
Presentation
Feature film, about 135 minutes, in Spanish and Mixtec; black and white, anamorphic widescreen, shot digitally in large format; long takes on slow lateral pans, few close-ups, no composed score
Register
Patient, level and exact, a house observed at the pace of its chores, broken by fire, a massacre, a stillbirth and the surf
Scale
One house, its two servants and its family, and the city, the countryside and the state pressing in through its doors
Governing Proposition
A young Mixtec woman works as maid and nurse in a middle-class house in Mexico City through a year in which the father leaves, the man who made her pregnant walks away, a massacre fills the street below a furniture store and her child is born dead. The wager of the film is that a servant can be loved inside a boundary that love does not cross, that a form which looks at her steadily and from a distance can show the love and the boundary at once, and that the city, the state and the sea reach a house through its doors and are absorbed there in work.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on the floor. Soapy water is thrown over the tiles of a courtyard and washes across them in waves, and in the water, framed by the roof above, an aeroplane crosses, reflected. The chore and the sky are in one image before a word is spoken. The law of the film is stated there: labour, water, and a world passing overhead that the work does not leave.
The woman washing is Cleo, played by Yalitza Aparicio, a young Mixtec woman who works as maid and nurse in a middle-class house in Colonia Roma, Mexico City, about 1970. With Adela, played by Nancy García García, she cooks, cleans, minds the children and carries the laundry. Between themselves the two women speak Mixtec; to the family, Spanish. The household is Sofía, played by Marina de Tavira, her husband Antonio, played by Fernando Grediaga, their children and the grandmother, Teresa, played by Verónica García. The children love Cleo, and the house runs on her work.
Antonio comes home in a large Ford and eases it into a garage barely wider than the car, by inches, over a courtyard where the dog leaves its mess. The car in the narrow garage is his presence in the house, and the film will measure the household’s change by it. The film watches this as it watches everything, on a slow lateral pan from a fixed axis, at a distance, in black and white of great depth, every plane in focus. Alfonso Cuarón wrote, directed and photographed it and cut it with Adam Gough; Eugenio Caballero designed it. There is no composed score: the soundtrack is the city, vendors, bands, a knife-grinder’s whistle, dogs and aircraft, laid around the house. It runs about 135 minutes in its one cut.
Movement II
Cleo has a lover, Fermín, played by Jorge Antonio Guerrero. Alone with her he shows off the martial arts he trains in, naked, with a curtain rod: a display the film stages for comedy, a man’s discipline put on show before a woman who watches it. The episode tilts toward a register the rest of the film does not keep.
Cleo becomes pregnant, and Fermín walks off. The film records the desertion and goes on, as the house goes on: the private loss is taken into the routine of the work, the floors, the meals, the children, and the routine does not stop for it. It is the first of the year’s two desertions, and the second is already in the house.
At the New Year the household goes to a hacienda in the countryside, among its landholders. In the night a forest fire breaks out, and figures carry buckets through the smoke while at its edge a man in costume sings. It is among the strangest images in the film and among its least required: the hacienda runs long, and the fire is kept more for what it looks like than for what it argues. The countryside and its landholders enter the film here, and the city waits.
Movement III
Antonio leaves the house, and the household is left under strain. Sofía keeps it going on composure, until one night she comes home drunk and scrapes the big car along the garage walls, alone. She tells Cleo: “siempre estamos solas” (“we are always alone”). Two women of different classes have been left by men in the same months, and for a moment one of them says so to the other.
The house changes with its father gone. The car that was eased into the garage is scraped, and later traded, and the household arranges itself around an absence. Cleo’s pregnancy advances, and on a visit to the hospital an earthquake shakes the nursery among the newborns. The omen is evoked, not explained. Her condition is shown from outside: the film watches her work and wait, and rarely moves nearer.
Cleo goes in search of Fermín, to the field where he trains, where hundreds of men are drilling. The instructor sets them a balance pose, and at the edge of the field, alone among the spectators, Cleo holds it, as only she does. The image puts Fermín’s discipline and her steadiness in one frame, and the film will need both.
Movement IV
On 10 June 1971 Cleo is in a furniture store above a street when the street fills. From the windows the crowd is seen running below; then paramilitaries, the Halcones, come into the store and hunt students between the furniture. One of them is Fermín. He raises his gun at Cleo, and her waters break. The man who betrayed her privately is the paramilitary in the street, and the state arrives at her body in the same instant as the birth.
This is the Corpus Christi massacre, and the film shows it once, from a window and among furniture, as it showed everything else: at a distance, in deep space, history crowding into a room. The city’s violence and the household’s emergency are one event, and in the same week the family’s break-up is under way: the massacre, the birth and the break-up meet.
The stillbirth is played in one long take. The doctors try to revive the child, and the camera stays, and the scene gives no relief. The child is a girl. The film keeps its distance from Cleo even here. It is the hinge of the year: everything before it led to a birth, and everything after it turns toward the sea.
Movement V
The family goes to the coast at Tuxpan, and Cleo goes with them. On the beach the sea nearly takes two of the children. Cleo, who cannot swim, walks into the surf after them, and the camera follows her on one lateral pan, without a cut, deeper and deeper, until she brings both back. It is a rare departure from the fixed axis, and the rescue is made a matter of her body and the time it takes.
On the sand the family holds her, clasped together against the low sun, and Cleo says what she has not said: “Yo no la quería” (“I didn’t want her”). The group reads as a pietà without insisting on it: a loss reversed, a birth through water by a woman who has just lost a child, and the family she saved gathered around her. The love is real, and the film shows it whole.
Then they return. In the house the bookshelves are gone. Cleo is sent for the laundry and climbs the stair to the roof with the basket, and an aeroplane crosses the sky above her, as one crossed the water on the floor in the first shot. The film ends on a dedication, “Para Libo”. The embrace on the sand and the laundry minutes later are the film’s whole statement: the love and the boundary both hold, and neither cancels the other. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2018 and, at the Academy Awards of 2019, Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Foreign Language Film, the first for Mexico in that category.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and the cut, and the spine resists the subtractive test. The opening floor-washing gives the film its law of labour and water. The car squeezed into the narrow garage is Antonio’s presence before he leaves, and its later scraping is the household’s change. The martial-arts field puts Fermín’s discipline and Cleo’s steadiness in one image, and the massacre needs it. The stillbirth is the hinge, and the beach is its reversal. What gives: the New Year at the hacienda runs long, the forest fire is kept more for its image than for its argument, and some household beats, the dog’s mess and the children’s squabbles, make their point and are repeated.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: in a household that loves her, the servant is loved inside a boundary that love does not cross, and the film shows both at once without resolving either into the other. On the sand the family holds Cleo, and on the return she is sent for the laundry. Sofía, drunk, names a second truth across class, of women left by men; a third is that the man who betrays Cleo privately is the paramilitary in the street. All of it is disclosed through image and sound. Held a tenth below the gate: Cleo’s inner life is kept opaque, and her condition is disclosed more from the household’s side than from her own.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of both kinds. The aeroplane reflected in soapy water raises a chore to the size of the sky. The forest fire at night, figures carrying buckets through the smoke and a man singing at its edge, is dreadful and strange. The massacre seen from the store window, the gun raised at a pregnant woman and her waters breaking, is the dreadful summit; the stillbirth, held in one long take, gives no relief. The beach is the other summit: Cleo, who cannot swim, walking into the surf on one lateral pan, and the family clasped on the sand against the low sun. Held below the top by the level the film keeps between these, by design.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The archetypal structure is partly built. Water runs through the film as one element of life and death: the washed floor, the waters broken in the shop, the stillborn child, the sea that nearly takes two children and gives them back through the woman whose own child did not live. The beach is staged as a loss reversed, a birth through water, and the group clasped on the sand reads as a pietà without insisting on it. The nurse, the house’s second mother, is an old figure, and the film sets her at the centre. The deserting fathers are nearly faceless. The earthquake and the fire are omens, evoked more than built, and the pattern accumulates rather than bears the whole.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is Italian neorealism and its untrained players, the memory film of childhood, Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), and Cuarón’s own long-take spectacle, as in Gravity (2013). The turn is to put that spectacle’s means, large-format photography, choreographed long takes and a surround sound field, at the service of a servant’s year, and to set the memoir’s centre on the nanny rather than the child who remembers. The stake was real: a black-and-white film in Spanish and Mixtec, with an untrained lead, no score and no stars, given to a streaming company. Held below the gate: the long take was a proven path for this director, and the memory film keeps its form whole.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The slow lateral pan on a fixed axis looks at the house as the house looks at Cleo: steadily, at a distance, never entering her. The wide frame sets her small in deep space while the family’s drama happens, and keeps the city, its bands, vendors and aircraft, in the same field as the household, so that history arrives as sound before it arrives as event. Without close-ups or a score, the viewer must see the labour the family does not. Told in ordinary coverage with music, it would be a family’s break-up with a maid in it. The cost: what the film knows of Cleo’s mind it cannot say in this form.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The evidence covers eight years, which is short. The questions were argued from the first and have not closed: whether the film sees Cleo or the family’s memory of her; whether its distance is respect or a repetition of the household’s gaze; whether the laundry and the stair are critique or reconciliation; how far its beauty softens the class relation it shows. Its place in Mexican argument about domestic workers and Indigenous representation added a reading beyond cinema. The form yields on return, in rhymes of water and aircraft, the car and the garage, the two desertions. What holds the axis lowest: most of this is forecast rather than shown, and part of the return is to surface and composition, which renews less than an open meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Released in 2018, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is the demonstration that the tools of the spectacle film, large-format digital photography, choreographed long takes and immersive sound, could carry a quiet domestic memoir at full scale. It perfected and redirected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide for a film in Spanish and Mixtec; the Golden Lion and three Academy Awards; a public argument in Mexico on domestic labour and an Indigenous lead; and a streaming company carried to the top of the festival and awards circuit. Much of that reach is institutional, not artistic, and the redirection of later film is not yet shown.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, across eight years. The film survives whole in its one version, with nothing lost and nothing altered. Its presence has been wide: a global streaming release, festival and cinema runs, prizes, teaching and continuing reference, though wide presence earns little on its own and fame is not permanence. The surface is set in 1970 and 1971 and dressed as memory, so little dates it to 2018. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Bottomless Well, is elapsed time, eight years of survival predicted rather than shown, and a presence that depends largely on one platform’s catalogue, with a large-format image few viewers have seen in the conditions it was made for.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The making bears weight in every department. Cuarón’s photography gives a grey scale of great depth and sharpness, every plane in focus, the lateral pan so steady that its rare departure, following Cleo into the sea, carries the climax. Crowds and space are staged in long takes without visible strain: the street seen from above, the earthquake in the nursery, the fire, the field of hundreds of men. The sound field, built without a score, places the city around the house. Yalitza Aparicio, untrained, carries the film in stillness and work; Marina de Tavira’s Sofía is exact. The costs: a uniform digital clarity that can be cold where memory would blur, comic set pieces staged for effect, and long takes that at times display command.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dog’s mess in the courtyard and the car scraped along the garage walls, domestic comedy, and the massacre in the street with a gun raised at a pregnant woman. One law governs both: the large world presses into the house through its doors, and Cleo absorbs it in work. Antonio’s car and the paramilitaries are the same men’s world arriving at the same doorway; the earthquake, the fire and the sea are the natural order arriving the same way. The strain is in tone: Fermín’s naked display and the costumed singer at the fire edge toward a surreal register the film does not otherwise keep, and the hacienda loosens the law into atmosphere.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 135 minutes holds. A consciousness, Cleo’s, held from outside; a family and its break-up; domestic labour, its routines and its hierarchy; class and ethnicity, an Indigenous worker speaking Mixtec in a criollo house; the city, its streets, cinema and building sites; the countryside and its landholders; the state, in the paramilitaries and the massacre; Mexico in 1970 and 1971; fire, earthquake and sea; birth and death. They are integrated: the massacre, the birth and the family’s break-up meet in one week, and the beach gathers class, love, death and the sea in one shot. The sacred barely enters, the state appears in a single eruption, and the centre is held at a distance.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.8, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.6. A making in which photography, staging and a scoreless sound field carry the beach, the massacre and the stillbirth through duration; elevation of both kinds, from an aeroplane in soapy water to a woman who cannot swim walking into the surf; and a form whose steady distance looks at Cleo as the house looks at her, so that the viewer must see the labour the family does not.
Limiting Dimension
The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 7.8: eight years in which the questions have stayed open and the film has survived whole, but in which most of the return and the survival are forecast, and the presence depends largely on one platform. Above them, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, a force that perfected a manner more than reorganised the medium, with a reach that is in large part institutional.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short of the bar of 8.5, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 three tenths short, The Swerve at 8.0 five tenths short, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9 six tenths short and The Imperishable at 7.8 seven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.9, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Roma as released in 2018, in its one cut of about 135 minutes, from the washed tiles of the courtyard to the dedication: written, directed and photographed by Alfonso Cuarón, produced by Gabriela Rodríguez, Nicolás Celis and Cuarón, edited by Cuarón and Adam Gough, with production design by Eugenio Caballero and no composed score. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 30 August 2018, opened in cinemas in late November 2018 and was released on Netflix on 14 December 2018. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the original, in Spanish and Mixtec; English renderings are a reader’s aid, and nothing here is charged to them. Two short lines of dialogue are quoted where their words are certain, in this reading’s own translation. Details that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, the shot count and average shot length, the order of some minor household scenes, the titles of the films seen at the cinema, a line about land taken from Cleo’s mother in her village, a political campaign glimpsed in the countryside, and any physical release, are not given.