Actually, I like director Alfonso Caron best.

Because Alfonso Cuarón, the best director, holds multiple positions in Rome, he is the director, screenwriter, editor, photographer and producer. Compared with other filmmakers, he really created movie myths in all aspects. Looking back at the history of Oscar, it is extremely rare that the best director can be nominated and awarded to foreign language film directors who are not English speakers. Apart from Ferini, our Ang Lee was nominated for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Rome, a personal letter shining with epic light

China audience is no stranger to Alfonso Cuarón, and before that, his Gravity was also fruitful in China. This time, he returned to his hometown and made a film based on his childhood.

The main story revolves around an upper-middle class family in Mexico City. The hostess Sophia has four children, but her husband elopes with Xiaosan on the pretext of going on a business trip. Sophia keeps the family life by hiding the truth from her children. Cleo, the maid at home, is gentle and kind, and she is a lover with a man who practices martial arts. Unfortunately, the sudden pregnancy makes the man abandon her cruelly. But Sophia, the hostess, didn't abandon Cleo and helped Cleo give birth to the child. Four children in the family seem to be the place of hope, and Caron is actually one of them.

From the perspective of ordinary people, the film truly depicts the Mexican society in the period of change in the 197s, combining the fate change of a small family with the grand background of the times, with delicate emotions and epic temperament. In Caron's story, men are irresponsible at the beginning and abandon at the end, and women are tenacious and self-reliant, which makes the film hazy with a layer of feminist aura.

In the film, Sophia said to Cleo, "We women are always lonely." Accusing men of their lack of responsibilities in the family seems to be a very private secret pain in Caron's life.

On June 1th, 1971, Mexico experienced the Corpus Christi Massacre, and more than 1 students were killed by the Mexican military during the parade. In the film, Caron goes back to this tragedy. Students hold flags and demonstrate in the street, while Cleo goes by bus to buy a crib for the soon-to-be-born child. In this movement, she meets her former lover who has become the perpetrator of the tragedy. She is so excited that her amniotic fluid breaks and gives birth to a dead baby.

Although this short story sounds incredible, it really happened to Caron's childhood maid. Under the great changes in this background, the fate of the little people may be rewritten, and Cleo's fate is the most powerful testimony to this era.

The film's style is very personal. It doesn't care about entertainment at all, and it doesn't care about ordinary audiences. It is a pure audio-visual language show. Although there are no expensive special effects and famous movie stars, a large number of extras are used in each scene to completely restore the sense of the times and the details of life in the neighborhood, so it is more difficult to shoot than those special effects blockbusters. Thousands of people perform in an orderly way in one scene, which is a rare visual spectacle!

In order to better portray that special era in Mexico, Caron adopted Alexa65 digital black-and-white photography. This is the first time that he tried to take the camera for his own feature film, and he got the best photography with this palm. It is not difficult for the audience who have seen this film to find that the photography of "Rome" is at its peak. From the beginning of the film, Caron has been very restrained and accurately captured the trajectory of the characters. Including the heroine Cleo's walking, the flowing housework, the father's careful parking, the family's expectation, and the switching of several sets of shots of this car, the parking stopped with a sense of ceremony in Caron's lens.