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Lizards in Movies |
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Roma (2018) |
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Spoiler Alert !
Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
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This film, written and directed by the great Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography, and was nominated for 7 more. The film chronicles a year in the life of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the maid of a high-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s. I'm going to hazard a guess that it's the only multi-Oscar winning film with a horned lizard in it. The horned lizard scene is trivial, and so brief you might miss it, but it's rare to see my favorite kind of lizard in a movie in any context, so I was thrilled to see it.
After her husband leaves her, Cleo's employer, Senora Sofia, takes her children away from the Roma neighborhood in Mexico City where they live to spend Christmas and New Years at an uncle's house in the country. One day we see a group of children and their caretakers walking along the dirt furrows in a plowed field. We see a close-up of a horned lizard. A boy grabs for it and calls out that he got one, but it gets away. (This makes me think that the children might have been actively hunting for horned lizards.) Then we see more close-ups of the lizard running, down into a trough, then back up to the top. Then we see a hand grabbing the lizard and the boy calls out "got it!" We never see if he kept it or released it.
The scene could be included just to show the city kids and the maid enjoying themselves in the country, but since the director/screenwriter said that the film is an attempt to capture the memory of events that he experienced, and to portray the women who raised him, it's possible he is re-creating an event from his own childhood - catching horned lizards in the country. That was probably more possible in the early 70s than it is now, since populations of most horned lizard species has diminished, after having lost much of their habitat to land development, and losing much of the food they need - harvester ants.
The movie was mostly filmed in Mexico City, so they probably used a common species of horned lizard found not far from there, most likely a Mexican Plateau Horned Lizard, Phrynosoma orbiculare. |
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