Roma
Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Written by: Alfonso Cuarón
Starring: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta, Marco Graf, Daniela Desea, Nancy García García, Verónica García, Fernando Grediaga, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza, Latin Lover, Zarela Lizbeth Chinolla Arellano
Drama - 135 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 3 Dec 2018
Written by: Alfonso Cuarón
Starring: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta, Marco Graf, Daniela Desea, Nancy García García, Verónica García, Fernando Grediaga, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza, Latin Lover, Zarela Lizbeth Chinolla Arellano
Drama - 135 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 3 Dec 2018
Director Alfonso Cuarón has taken audiences into a dystopian near-future and even into space; now he wants to go home. The Oscar-winner and force behind Gravity and Children of Men is going even further back than his earlier film from Mexico, Y Tu Mamá También. He’s thinking of his childhood in early ‘70s Mexico City. He’s thinking of his beloved nanny. Writing a semi-autobiographical story about a nanny, the bourgeois family she tends to, and how Mexican politics, culture, and social mores impact all of them is Cuarón exploiting his personal story for cinematic gains. Roma hits hard, but in a unique case, the way it looks and feels hits harder than the plot advancing scenes in a year in the life of Cleo the nanny.
Roma is an ode to Cuarón’s real life nanny, Libo. Nobody can ever know a writer and director’s specific motivations to create a piece of art, but Roma functions as a combination of nostalgia for a very specific time and place and a thank you letter to the woman who did the heavy lifting of raising Alfonso. He’s saying he didn’t forget; he recognizes Libo had it rough and now wants the world to know there was a special class of working women in Mexico City raising the children, doing the laundry, and cleaning up dog shit. They are also all mestiza, treated as a second, lower caste than the more light-skinned, European-influenced businessmen and landowners.
Roma is an ode to Cuarón’s real life nanny, Libo. Nobody can ever know a writer and director’s specific motivations to create a piece of art, but Roma functions as a combination of nostalgia for a very specific time and place and a thank you letter to the woman who did the heavy lifting of raising Alfonso. He’s saying he didn’t forget; he recognizes Libo had it rough and now wants the world to know there was a special class of working women in Mexico City raising the children, doing the laundry, and cleaning up dog shit. They are also all mestiza, treated as a second, lower caste than the more light-skinned, European-influenced businessmen and landowners.
Acting as his own cinematographer, because who could know better what the world looked, sounded, and felt like back then, Cuarón films these domestic scenes with the eye of an auteur who has thought long and hard about brining these situations to life. As the opening credits appear, we stare directly down at entryway stones being washed and scrubbed as the reflection of a passenger airliner passes through the dirty water - a plane Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) may see reflected in her wash pail everyday, but not a contraption she can ever dream of riding in. Scrubbing up after a defecating dog who never gets walked, only let loose in the walkway, and climbing up to the roof to wash and hang laundry with the dozen other nannies/maids stacked behind Cleo on top of neighboring houses, Cuarón makes such routine domestic activities pop and look gorgeous rather than unpleasant.
After wiping up dishes, noses, and tears, Cleo sneaks off with a boy she believes she is falling in young love with. They hide away in a hotel room and attack each other in the back of movie theaters until Cleo discovers she is pregnant. Abortion is out of the question in an environment ruled by strict Catholicism, but Cleo is not cast out like a leper either. When it arrives, her baby will be one more chore amongst the thousand others. Cleo is not the only household dweller experiencing relationship turmoil. Señora Sofia (Marina de Tavira), the lady of the house, paces and invents excuses for why her husband and the father of her four children fails to come home from his medical conference. Her frustration, sadness, and anger frequently find an outlet against some perceived action left undone or done shoddily by Cleo.
Most viewers will enter the film knowing very little about Mexican society and concerns in 1971. They will exit knowing there was still a rigid, hierarchical chain of command governing who owns the land, who works the land, and who keeps a thumb on top of any potential attempts to change how things work. Cleo attends a New Year’s celebration with the family and watches the drunken landowners live like kings on top of the peasants doing their best to keep the buffoons from burning their own plantations down. There are even castes among the working class - the rural workers mock the city workers as poseurs who forget where they came from. Later on, Cuarón shows us government soldiers and hired thugs mauling and murdering student protestors to staunch urban unrest. The specific issues the students march for are left unsaid, but the severe reaction levied upon them is enough to understand where the animus is coming from.
Fans of Cuarón’s science-fiction successes may leer cautiously at what looks from afar as the beginning of his Fellini phase, but even sci-fi and dystopian fantasy acolytes should be able to take in and admire pure cinematic beauty. Leaving genre and plot out of it, Roma is shot in crisp black and white with every detail scrutinized and included for a reason, even in the impressively long tracking shots with Cleo running down Mexico City streets or watching an army of peasant martial artists practice their machismo in the middle of a dusty field. Audiences already know Cuarón is a master filmmaker and he has been duly recognized for it many times over; however, he surprises movie lovers again successfully connecting 2018 digital crowds with 1970's analog Mexico. Very few directors could pull off a feat of this audacity. Whether or not a beloved, autobiographical premise is required to do it is debatable, but Cuarón’s virtuosity behind the camera is not.
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