I did not know what to expect going into this movie. I came out thoroughly overwhelmed by the emotional impact of the protagonist Cleo's story. But what really gets you is the sense you have, while watching, that Cleo and the other main characters are deeply implicated in an entire larger world, a world re-created for a film but that is so detailed, complex, and vibrant that it feels startlingly real. As such, the dense energy of an entire society seems to be conveyed to us through the quiet and unassuming figure of a lowly maid, the type of person until recently rarely chosen as the center of such an epic look at a time and place, but who emerges as epitomizing the best that society has to offer.
As a result, the film is a sort of bourgeois family-saga told through the margins. The story may have an allegorical significance for Mexican society at large. A white family is almost destroyed as its patriarch gives up and takes off, abandoning his wife, four children, the two maids and dog. As everyone is let down by his betrayal, it is Cleo, the indigenous maid, who holds everyone together, through the quiet strength of her loyalty and stability.
The film's plot, though, has garnered much less interest than its visuals, of which much has already been made. They are indeed stunning, and do seem to be modeled after the great Mexican tradition of muralism, a consciously social and political art form that portrays moments of great upheaval and change through a panoramic, long-view of Mexican society.
However, for me the great success of the film is precisely its success in shifting between the small and the big: it imbeds the close-up, fine-grained story of Cleo and her employer's family within the greater tapestry of the larger world of Mexico City in the 1970s. Throughout the film, the turmoil of the latter increasingly encroaches upon the world of the family's house. In the end, it was the back-and-forth between the intimacy we begin to feel with the characters, the emotional impact of their story and their search for a new equilibrium, and the greater sense we have of an outside world similarly roiled by instability and unforeseeable changes.
As a result, the film is a sort of bourgeois family-saga told through the margins. The story may have an allegorical significance for Mexican society at large. A white family is almost destroyed as its patriarch gives up and takes off, abandoning his wife, four children, the two maids and dog. As everyone is let down by his betrayal, it is Cleo, the indigenous maid, who holds everyone together, through the quiet strength of her loyalty and stability.
The film's plot, though, has garnered much less interest than its visuals, of which much has already been made. They are indeed stunning, and do seem to be modeled after the great Mexican tradition of muralism, a consciously social and political art form that portrays moments of great upheaval and change through a panoramic, long-view of Mexican society.
However, for me the great success of the film is precisely its success in shifting between the small and the big: it imbeds the close-up, fine-grained story of Cleo and her employer's family within the greater tapestry of the larger world of Mexico City in the 1970s. Throughout the film, the turmoil of the latter increasingly encroaches upon the world of the family's house. In the end, it was the back-and-forth between the intimacy we begin to feel with the characters, the emotional impact of their story and their search for a new equilibrium, and the greater sense we have of an outside world similarly roiled by instability and unforeseeable changes.