> It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain gestures.
The assumption here is that Cuarón should've made the film about Cleo, by giving her a voice and explaining to us her point of view... when maybe Cuarón might be trying to show us how he was unable to really understand this person who had a very rich life outside of his world. If Cuarón's experience was always defined by a very simple interface (that of the "sirvienta" or "mucama"), then it's understandable that his version of her is a muted - one could say desaturated - version of the real person.
> ...and then the family claiming they love the maid, it just isn't believable given how they've ignored her and mostly treated her like crap.
Most families' relationships with their maids is super weird. My family was never affluent enough to afford one, but I had plenty of friends who had a "sirvienta" (the Argentine equivalent of Cleo's role). To the kids, the sirvienta was a second mother, to the parents the sirvienta was a friend, psychiatrist and help. All of them would talk fondly of their sirvientas as if they were part of the family... to an extent. If a sirvienta falls in hard times (be it health, money or otherwise), the family doesn't usually offer to help.
In other words, as long as the sirvienta is in the house, she's part of the family. The moment she leaves, she's just an stranger they didn't really care that much for. Very strange.
> Speaking of crap, the dog shit. Why the hell was that so important to Cuarón that he features it, what, a dozen times?
I think this is Cuarón's rendering of the kind of things that imprint on you as a kid. I remember my first time walking around La Boca, in Buenos Aires, after living abroad for a few years. The amount of dog shit on the sidewalk was staggering. I was surprised, even though I grew up less than an hour away from there. I could see myself remembering the dog shit had I grown up in La Boca.