Not too long ago in a galaxy pretty much right here, (it was definitely this galaxy) I was an avid Tyler Perry hater. Mere mention of Tyler Perry's name around me, and my joints would stiffen. my bowels would loosen, and my pupils would roll counter clockwise in opposing directions from each other. As a self proclaimed cinephile blackbelt Z level.. (Okay, Okay! get off my back it was a brown belt, and I made up the last part) As a self proclaimed cinephile, having been introduced to cinematic history, and knowing through my own experience of how many times black people throughout cinema had been reduced to certain kinds of tropes all too easily recognizable in certain attributes of Perry’s plays, I found Perry's films to be poorly directed, shot at best like a journeyman, full of platitudes, and more specifically, angled towards making white people laugh. I know now that the latter half of that criticism is unfair. While I still feel Perry is a particularly bad director, (and feel in the future if he continues making films he should leave helming over to someone more technically gifted) upon interrogation, my feelings on Perry's movies we're indebted to my feelings towards white people. My fears more specifically. Being a member of an oppressed class can tend to put an extra body, an extra voice inside your head. It’s a phenomenon particular to those of us who live under the hegemony of any dominant structure, class, or normative ideology. In this case the standardization of whiteness, makes everything else feel abnormal, this has the effect of causing one to alternate between voices, which in turn leads to genuine questioning as to which voice is actually your own as an artist, and as the consumer of said art . This double-mindedness spoken of before by DuBois, and Baldwin, and hooks, I especially feel in certain places, forums, or mediums. I could sit in a room surrounded by mostly white people , with another black person being in the room, and portions of my mind automatically place one of them inside my head as a silent narrator, nudging and telling me which words of mine, or of the other person in the room might work as forms of resistance, or forms of compliance. Informing my decisions as to whether this other black person is being acknowledged as speaking for me simply by being black, and whether or not I agree with the messaging, and anywhere in between that spectrum. The point being while watching Tyler Perry movies, I frequently criticized his films based solely on my fears of what it was that Perry was saying or who it was that Tyler Perry was representing, or who it was these movies were for, and how those representations played to white people, more than whether they were or were not a true representation of the people that Tyler Perry wanted to represent, and whether or not this was actually Tyler’s voice, his intent, never mind whether or not they were actually entertaining. I realized the fallacy of insisting that the way in which Tyler Perry sees black folk was inherently wrong without examining or even asking first, if it is possible that the opinion of black folk like my VERY OWN FAMILY (who enjoyed his films) was valid, or giving it credence. It was , is the very definition of condescension, as well as an erasure of those very black folk, and of the range and dimension of representation of black folk. It seems we might be arriving at yet another somewhat binary point in cinematic criticism, where due to a system, and mode of delivery which seems to impede upon our artistic sensibilities about the art form, we are insisting upon a very narrow way of filmmaking. I say “yet another” because this was the same kind of thought process that I believe brought about auteur theory, which I believe got a lot right and quite a lot wrong about filmmaking. After all any insistence of one voice in a process which is inherently collaborative is in and of itself a problematic pronouncement for various reasons, which is not to say that it is all wrong either. Insistence upon a very specific political vein in filmmaking as inherent to the films value or excellence is equally problematic. My point here is film and storytelling is rarely a-political, but it is also not merely political. This is the crux of my argument against Richard Brody, and a few others who have written articles with a very particular point of emphasis in their critique of Alfonso Caurón's “Roma.”

If there is anything I want to bring to my criticism, it is the sensibility of the artist, and a humility about what it is I do. Most of these critiques, actually all of these critiques (Brody being the most well known) seem to center around the idea of what Caurón owes the audience, but nothing of what the audience owes Caurón. What I believe the audience which of course includes us critics owes the creator or the artist is the willingness to decipher as truthfully and authentically as possible, what it is the creator intends to do, and from there decipher how well they did that, and to some extent determine in our opinion whether or not that intent is worthy of praise. I ask myself as much as is possible to discern, what is it Caurón’s film intends to do? I say that Cauron’s film is the cinematic version of a love letter, a poetic birthday card, or one of those social media dedications we so often see on our feeds. I do not mean this as a form of disparagement, but of appreciation for what it means to both Caurón, and to the subject of his love in his token of appreciation. In the Bible, when Paul would write letters to the various churches, these letters usually featured some sort of authorial intent. Some of them about love, some of them about the more technical aspects of what it means to be a church member. No one looked at the beauty that lies within these letters, and then questioned why Paul isn't, including definitive and specific strokes interrogating the social political strife that was going during the time. That is because understanding the intent of or motive behind something is critical to properly assessing its value. The film is a dedication, a letter , its impact meant to reside firmly in the romantic and the sentimental not in the realist examination of class struggle analysis. The cranky dismissal of the impact of this film reads to me like one of those rants about how those social media dedications are really about the person posting them, and not about subject of them. The recognition of the polished nature of the storytelling, only lends credence to what it supposed to be. It is Caurón using his craft, his skill, to tell his beloved how much she meant to him. It’s a cinematic scrapbook of his memories, collected and painted with love and no one wants to hear the guy in the back grumbling about how it didn’t have all the parts where she, and the whole of Mexico suffered to raise his little bratty ass in his dedication to her, or how it didn’t include any in depth examination of her interiority.

Portions of this critique and many of the critiques beyond Roma also seem to have a particular kind of criticism that seem to run clearly within the spectrum of that dubious claim that style, in an of itself lacks substance. As i've said many times, style is substance within and of itself. Miranda from the devil wears Prada when she gives that a very famous line about how clothing comes to be.

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I say that the work in the expression that goes into declaring a sort of authorial intent is an art. Anything, or anyone from within the realm of fashion would tell you that there is a difference between fashion and style, style being at the higher end of that spectrum, because it usually represents or says something about the author themselves. Only in cinema and only of late, because in most of the early works of film style was very important, and many time these films style - be it expressionism or cubism were part and parcel to the substance of the story. I take deep exception to any idea that things that speak to the aesthetic of something, or aesthetically of something mean less, when that could be very much so part of the authorial intent, or of what makes something powerful, of what allows something to speak to us. For instance, what Mr. Brody, again writing for the New Yorker bemoans in Chloe Zhao’s “The Rider” was a scene of magnificent poetry for me for all the reasons he found it dismissive…

““Brady’s knowledge of horses is remarkable; Zhao shows him putting his knowledge into action, and does so in scenes that are largely tightened, truncated, edited down to illustrative sidebars, and their brevity is governed by their silence. Brady offers a few calming, encouraging, or exhorting words to the horses as he trains them, but Zhao never gives him—never gives Jandreau—the cinematic space to say what he’s perceiving, planning, seeing, and doing. In the first display of his prowess as a horse trainer, Apollo’s owner asks Brady how he learned to do it. Brady credits his mother and father with teaching him everything he knows, then adds, “I’ve learned a lot looking down between those ears.” And that’s it—not another word, in the whole film, about his understanding of the ways of horses or the specifics of what he’s doing—why he slaps the horse’s flanks with the reins, why he gives a horse a gun to sniff, why he pushes a horse one way and then another. For that matter, when Brady teaches a friend to ride competitively (another scene with an intriguing documentary center), Zhao doesn’t bother to hear from Brady about the skills that he’s imparting, about his underlying understanding of what’s involved in riding a bucking bronco.””

It is because the scene spoke to me without words without these technical aspects, that I could appreciate it more. Too many times that's done in my opinion so that you can impress upon me the knowledge that you have of this particular field, when, most of the time I'm gonna dismiss that information anyway, to get to the heart of what I need to know about this character, about this emotion, and about the conjoining of both. You can throw all the Wall Street and F-14 Tomcat fighter jet lingo at me while watching ‘Top Gun” or ”Wall street,” but I will remember next to none of that, and none of it will matter anywhere near as much to me as some of the striking imagery, or the emotion behind some of the silence. Unless we are viewing an almost a completely different film with a completely different mission, we don't need to know what the political circumstances surrounding Cleo's abortion are, in fact I’m sure including them in this case ends one of two ways ; as a distraction, or as incomplete and underwhelming.

Just because we do not see proper representation in its fullness within the industry, it does not then become the job of individual directors to tell stories they are incapable or insufficiently prepared to tell. I've seen a couple of cases recently this year with this sort of insistence that is very incomplete to me. This jamming of political ideologies into films or more importantly into filmmakers has the potential, ( and I do mean potential, this is not anywhere near something guaranteed to happen) to stifle the creative process, decrease variety, and make performers out of directors. I am one of the few people who disagreed with the idea that the character “Hattie” the african american slave from the book and the original film should have been placed in Sofia Coppola's remake of “The Beguiled” Ira Madison also wrote an outstanding piece saying much of the the same for the same reasons here. There is nothing in Coppola’s repertoire that said that she had the range to discuss that kind of story in any way that would have not ended in a disaster, so it was best to do exactly what she did. Never mind that the beguiled is not about the antebellum south anymore than Marie Antoinette is about the French Revolution. It's a story that chooses to sharpen its focus into the micro rather than the macro, telling a very specific story about women, and about power. Insisting these movies dive from their own specific focus to extend outside of it to magnify what amounts to almost an entirely different movie , is I think the wrong message to send to future filmmakers and to current ones. It was not Tyler Perry's fault, nor his cross to bear that the industry around him refused to give proper representation to the diaspora of the black experience (something they are just now doing with people like Barry Jenkins, Ava Duvernay, Dee Rees, F. Gary Gray, and Ryan Coogler on the scene). I truly believe that had they been released today , Tyler Perry's films would have fit quite nicely into this current year, providing nice juxtaposition, and a healthy depiction of the various forms of black families, of black love , of the black experience in America. Every bit as important to a well rounded black cinema experience as is the work of Barry Jenkins. I say this to say that the same thing goes for Alfonso Caurón. Like Perry, Caurón owes us no debt to tell a story in a way that he did not see it. I think its incumbent upon the critic in order to be true to his /her/their duty to the art and to their own audiences to ask them to be realistic as to whether the problem their having is a problem of the film or one of the industry. In this case I think there is ample evidence that A. we barely have stories about Mexico at all, B. That when we do these stories are mostly tales of Mexico’s crime and corruption problems even when well intentioned. C. That maybe due to all of that, even a well intentioned, incomplete, but loving, romanticized, depiction of a working class maid, wrapped in moving images of emotional authenticity from memory might be a welcome sight. Saving the criticism of whether or not we have enough films that depict the struggle of the working class as faithfully as they do honorably for the various studios that have not green-lit or highlighted the work of the authors best fit to tell those stories. An argument made spectacularly here.

Director Sofia Copola opted out of telling a story she knew she was not prepared to tell, and instead chose to make us aware of the effect of the loss of social and financial currency gained in slavery.

There is a story of what middle class workers have gone through all around this world, and especially in places like Mexico to be told, and it most assuredly need to be told and with as much aplum, and consistency as is these kind of stories, but it shouldn't be told by somebody who clearly doesn't have the range to tell that story. It's not Caurón’s responsibility to tell that story. It's upon the industry to allow for other people who want to tell those stories and are frankly more equipped to tell those stories, who have lived that experience that it may be conveyed responsibly. The artist’s responsibility to me will always lean further toward the the personal, the political can be found in that expression, and politics can indeed be personal, and if the personal can be used as an aesthetic as it is charged in Brody’s essay than it is still worthy of pursuit as aesthetic is not inherently without its own value. So, then what we must be asking seeing as though even the lack of politics is a politic in and of itself, is to discern the source of this lack of politic. It is clear that some would suggest the source comes from a place of dishonesty, an attempt to avoid the more supposedly honest socio political constraints his maid lived under to assuage his own conscious. Cinematically purging himself of guilt by telling this more favorable story of the long suffering but stoic and noble servant . It’s a fair argument, especially outside the context of the art itself. We know there is a well documented tendency by those anywhere near the proximity of power to alleviate themselves of guilt from their role (be it covert or overt) in the systemic oppression of others. by offering such platitudes as a reckoning. It would be disingenuous I think to refute that this played some role in Caurón’s production here, and yet I argue that the source is still honesty. To start, that Caurón’s film is honestly personal. It is not a film that seems to desire to want to engage in social commentary and then haphazardly excuse itself from the important particulars. Rather it affirms itself not from a subjective standpoint, but objectively as more honest to tell the story you do know, rather than to trying to tell the one you don’t by neither experience, memory, or identity. When one critiques movies like Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit”, for reasons very similar to the argument made about Roma even though Bigelow’s approach is much closer to what it is Brody is asking of Caurón, it seems to me to obscure the obvious…

Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit” was roundly criticized for its erasure of black women, and fetishization of black pain.

Poverty, blackness, browness, queerness, womanhood, they are not altogether impossible to understand by those outside of it , but they are best understood from either a first person point-of-view or from a firm and level playing field. Demanding faithful and loyal authenticity is somewhat ridiculous to ask from a man who not only was a child during the time, but so firmly detached from her experience as a woman, as a brown woman, as a member of the working class, that even a genuine attempt to go research the details of Cleo/Libo’s life, jumble them all together, and then try to tell the story that includes the kind of minutiae of not only her experience but that of Mexico’s at the time would I guarantee come off as ham fisted. As an African American I've seen this paternalized brand of filmmaking before, and on a regular basis, most recently in The Farrelly Brother’s Th Greens Book, and Martin Mcdonagh’s “The Three Billboards. When well-intentioned well-to-do white people try to tell stories about black pain or the black experience, or anyone outside of their well curated bubble it rarely works out well. It's not to say that it can not work - again, there are no absolutes here, but that there are far more Amistad’s, than there are “Color Purple’s”, more “Glory”’s than “A Soldier's Story”. Usually the difference between those films is again authorial intent, and proximity to experience, because the true author of those movies, (the ones that work) are those who have lived the experience, in those cases Alice Walker (The Color Purple), and Charles Fuller (A Soldier’s Play”/Story). The experience can then be shuttered through the lens of somebody who then may somewhat understand that experience (as a jewish american for example) so that it's not completely diluted, but the original parts of that experience are filtered through the mind of somebody that is directly related to that experience.

Though Directed by white men of Jewish decent both “The Color Purple” and “A Soldier’s Story” maintained their integrity because of their authors direct proximity to the identity or experience.

The honesty in Roma lies in that I think it clearly understands what it is, that it is a film about memory, incomplete and filtered as such. It is a labour of love, and I believe sincere appreciation, based on an understanding that he cannot possibly have understood her experience but he nonetheless loves her for it. Appreciation is never all-encompassing, it is always respectfully distant, with the understanding that the craft, experience, identity, etc is foreign to the other. The idea here should be to provide a counter balance so that we are not only getting appreciation, but interrogation, and honesty in the macro of the industry, and on a case by case basis with the individual depending upon a number of variables. Anything else much like the accusations lobbed against Caurón, reeks of taking away agency, and honesty from those who you claim to want to empower by speaking for them, and erasing the fullness of their lives.

Departures

Departures

Film and Television Criticism

Departures

ROMA is a labour of love, not political treatise, and it's better not worse for it.