New Year's Streamers

A couple of Netflix productions:

ROMA (B) - This stylistically stunning wank from Alfonso Cuaron has little substantive use beyond the writer-director's own re-enactment of his home movies growing up in Mexico at the dawn of the 1970s. The cinematography (handled by Cuaron himself) is immaculate, with a crisp black and white that makes the film look like a restored documentary from 40-plus years ago. Even a pile of dog crap getting smushed by a car tire has an elegance to it.

You could easily get bored stiff by the antics of this bourgeois family near Mexico City and the minutiae of their existence. The parents are surreptitiously going through a separation. The kids are in love with their housekeeper/nanny, Cleo (newcomer Yalitza Aparicio), and this movie is ostensibly about her.

Very little happens in the first half. A plot develops in the second half, between Cleo and her boyfriend, but it's rather trite soap-opera stuff. A police/military crackdown on protesters (pinpointing this section around June 1971) is rendered with a jarring vitality. Every frame of the movie is meticulously imagined and presented, like the opening credits of the hosing down of a floor, punctuated with the faint image of a passing airplane (a recurring theme) reflected in the swirling water. Even rooftop clotheslines seem to be infused with meaning.

It can be a mesmerizing two hours or a crashing bore; your mileage may vary.

HAPPY AS LAZZARO (B) - This fable about the fate of the working class in a rapacious capitalist system is as much of a head-scratcher as a thinker. A bunch of tenant farmers live a rough-hewn existence in rural Italy, not knowing that such indentured servitude had been outlawed years earlier. Their mascot is Lazzaro, a simple-minded ox of a worker. When the Marquess visits one day, she brings along her son, Tancredi the Marquis, who plots with Lazzaro in a fake kidnapping scheme.

A bizarre twist occurs midway through, and a time jump (with a twist) vaults us not only into the future but into the realm of magical realism.  Here, though, it might be better described as mysticism, as filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher borrows elements from Christianity and native beliefs. Lazzaro walks the Earth wide-eyed, like Jesus Christ -- or maybe Forrest Gump as if played by "Taxi"-era Andy Kaufman.

It's difficult to discuss the plot, because, while the film can be slow and frustrating, part of the joy in watching comes from Rohrwacher toying with narrative conventions. Suffice it to say that the indentured servants' existence in more modern, urban Italy doesn't change much when they become full-fledged members of the underclass. Events build to a contrived ending, involving a fable that will either charm you or make you roll your eyes.