Author: Fiachra GIBBONS / Source: Yahoo! News
Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron won the Golden Lion top prize at the Venice film festival Saturday for “Roma”, which critics called not merely a movie but “a vision”.
With its highly emotional story centred on an indigenous maid working for a middle-class family in Mexico City in 1971, it has been hailed as Cuaron’s most personal film — and also his best.
Cuaron told reporters that in an incredible coincidence “today is the birthday of Libo, the woman the movie is based on. What a present!”
The film industry bible Variety said “Roma” is likely to go down as a “masterpiece”.
“It is no mere movie — it’s a vision… where every image and every emotion is perfectly set in place,” said critic Owen Gleiberman.
Cuaron “dunks us, moment by moment, image by luminously composed image, into a panorama of the hurly-burly of Mexico City.”
The Italian press declared it “sublime” while for The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw it was a “complete triumph”.
Venice has become the launchpad for the Oscars race with Hollywood heavyweights jostling for attention in a line-up director Alberto Barbera called “the best in 30 years”.
– Vintage year –
Cuaron, 56, reconstructed his childhood home for the Netflix-backed film, borrowing furniture back from relatives to recreate how it was when he was 10.
But the heart of the film is the “luminous” performance of first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio, who plays Cleo, a young live-in maid of Mixteco heritage who looked after the director as a boy.
“Cleo is based on my babysitter when I was young. We were a family together,” Cuaron told AFP.
“But when you grow up with someone you love you don’t discuss their identity. So for this film I was forced to see myself as this woman, a member of the lower classes, from the indigenous population. This is a point of view I had never had before.”
The second prize Silver Lion went to France’s Jacques Audiard for his hugely enjoyable Western “The Sisters Brothers” starring Joaquin Phoenix and John C Reilly.
Another Wild West tale, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”…
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