Roma: Alfonso Cuarón

[The following was written for the monthly newsletter for the First Presbyterian Church of Del Ray.]

To watch Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is to be gently lowered into the warm bath of the director’s memories. Happy memories of growing up in the middle class neighborhood of Colonia Roma in the 1970s, back when the wealthy Europeans who’d built lavish French-style mansions had fled to better neighborhoods, abandoning their spacious houses for well-to-do Mestizo families and their servants. Sad memories of watching his parents’ marriage crumble, helpless to do anything as their family fell further and further apart. Scary memories of earthquakes, social unrest, and US-backed death squads. Safe memories of his Mixtec maid waking him in the mornings, walking him from school in the afternoons, tucking him into bed at night. He’s taken these memories, the good and the bad, and shaped them like a potter into a work of unforgettable beauty.

Though the film features a kaleidoscopic array of POVs, it follows, more often than not, the day-to-day life of Cleo (first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio), the live-in maid of biochemist Sofia (Marina de Tavira), doctor Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), and their four children. For the first hour the film lulls us into the routine of her day-to-day life, cooking and cleaning the house, caring for the children, waiting on Sofia and Antonio. On her off days she travels into the bustling center of Mexico City with her friend, fellow maid Adela (Nancy García), and their two boyfriends. After one of these outings she discovers her boyfriend, martial artist Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), has gotten her pregnant. When she tells him, he runs out on her, leaving her to face motherhood alone. At home, her mistress Sofia is having her own romantic issues—she knows Antonio is cheating on her and has a mental breakdown when his “business trip” to Quebec stretches from a few days to six months.

As the two women try to figure out their futures without their absent partners, Caurón treats us to a number of devastating set-pieces: a country outing to the house of a wealthy American family on New Year’s Eve turns tragic when a nearby forest catches fire and the drunken revelers struggle to put it out; a trip to buy a crib for Cleo’s child gets interrupted by the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre where CIA-trained shock troops nicknamed “Los Halcones” opened fire on pro-democracy protestors; a sojourn to the beach almost becomes deadly when two of Sofia’s children get swept out to sea by an unexpected current. Through it all Caurón, who served as his own cinematographer, keeps his camera steady and level, preferring long, uninterrupted shots where the camera moves almost exclusively via horizontal tracking to the left or right. The result is a feeling of audience omnipresence, making us feel both outside yet intimately familiar with the goings-on in the characters’ lives as they drift in and out of the spacious frames like worker ants in a nest.

Though written as a love letter to Caurón’s real-life nanny growing up—one of Sofia’s children, an introverted blond-haired boy, is even strongly suggested to be a director surrogate—the central dynamic of the film isn’t the one between Cleo and the children. Surprisingly, it’s not even that of Cleo and her unborn child. Instead, it could be seen as the relationship between Cleo and Sofia, two women cruelly tossed aside by their men with no financial support. At first there’s the worry that class differences will keep the two women apart; indeed, in one scene Sofia heartlessly blames Cleo for failing to keep one of her children from eavesdropping on a telephone call where she confesses the details of Antonio’s affair. But time and again the two women come through for each other, giving the other the love and support the world otherwise refuses them. It culminates one of the most soul-shattering group hugs in cinema history, where the whole family embraces a weeping Cleo while Sofia assures her again and again that they all love her. Watching this scene of two women normally kept apart by racial and economic circumstances, it’s impossible not to remember the Apostle Paul’s insistence in the Epistle to the Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” For all its transcendent loveliness and power, it is perhaps this illustration of Christ-like love that makes Roma more than just a great film—it makes it an essential one.