Roma is a 2018 drama about that chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family’s maid in Mexico City in the early 1970s.
I want to first direct you to Mark’s review of Roma, his thoughts on director Alfonso Cuarón‘s latest film wonderfully insightful and affecting. It’s a movie very much out of step with modern conventional methods and as such, a challenge to properly justify in a typical review. Mark finds just the right voice to give the film its due. Read it.
I’m sure if you’re here, you’ve no doubt seen the film and are sort of still in a bit of limbo, searching for some kind of connection to anyone or anything to piece together how you feel. Roma is a unique experience that is tempting to call experimental but that’s really a weak description, the movie more of an evolution, taking cues from many influential and innovative international film directors of the past half century and delivering a jarring slice of life that by its end, has few to compare with.
Having said that and looking to open up a little about the movie, I’ll take for granted that you have sat through Roma already and feel comfortable with me discussing a few spoilers. If you’ve come this far and haven’t, then it’s imperative you stop here and do so before reading further.
There are two moments that I want dig a little deeper into, and while the film as a whole is well worth exploring, it’s these that I think reach for both ends of the spectrum between raw emotional pain and layered metaphorical symbolism. Let’s start with the latter.
The beginning of the movie has us looking down on a stone tiled floor slowly covered in soapy water, an unseen mop just out of shot sloshing the rolling pools of dirty water about the surface. In the reflection of it all, we see a square of light from above, the sky beyond and for a brief moment, the silhouette of an airplane quitely crossing the space. Even before we see a character on screen, we already get a sense of what this will be, the small reflective window out of the room a beacon of sorts to an unreachable destination, the plane a symbol of escape no one we are about to meet able to have access to. This small, seemingly insignificant shot tells a mindful audience that there is a tiny space in this place where the outside world exists, but it has no impact here and is drowned and lost in the toils of those bound to the ground below.
I love how Cuarón introduces us to his story, without a single word spoken, creating a powerful hook that lures us into the slow reveal, our minds almost willing the camera to move up to let us see what lies beyond these puddles of water, to who can’t see these planes high above, and why it is here where we must begin. What’s most curious and one that perhaps many might not even have noticed is the total lack of music, the film in its entirety without a score (another big risk in movies, traditionally a medium congested with songs and scores). And yet, there is an undeniable rhythm to the movement of the movie, established at the start, the way the water gathers on screen and the gentle brushes of the mop off camera. It’s mesmerizing.
I really want you to appreciate how bold this start it, the unbroken shot on the floor for four minutes giving away the theme of the entire movie, doing so with such imagination and subtle style as credits gently appear on screen that you nearly miss the whole thing. It’s true movie magic, the kind that makes you just sort of feel glad to be witness too.
And with that, let’s shift to the third act. By this point, we’ve been following the story of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio in her screen debut), the housemaid of a wealthy family in 1970s Mexico. I’ll let that link of the story sit undissected and instead concentrate only on Cleo’s dilemma: her unplanned pregnancy. She’s alone in this, the father having abandoned her in one of the film’s more distressing moments, though the family she works for, especially the mother (Marina de Tavira), offer her some help. Either way, she eventually ends up in the hospital to give an emergency birth. It’s the start of one of the most breathtaking scenes in recent memory.
There’s been a lot of babies born in the movies, of course, so many it would seem there is nowhere for a director go in how to give this any fresh spin. In some ways, Cuaroón doesn’t seem to be trying to and yet somehow manages to create the most traumatic birthing moment perhaps ever filmed. The urgency of Cleo’s situation is obvious, but it’s how sterile, or rather, perfuctory, the hospital crew takes to delivering the child that makes the result so desperately heartbreaking. Cleo is but one of many in the system all ready to have babies and there seems no time to make it personal.
And yet personal it is. Achingly so, this made so by Aparicio’s astonishing performance and the way Cuarón frames the scene, the mother in the foreground and the action in the background. You can’t watch this and not be immediately affected by the woman’s plight, mostly because everything that’s led to this has invested you deeply in her history. And then, not much later in the film, after another absolutely harrowing moment brings Cleo to her knees in the sands on the shores by the sea, a confession rattles us. What a truly haunting moment.
Roma is a modern masterpiece, a film that won’t really change anything about how movies will be made going forward, but sends a clear signal that Cuarón is working on a different level. He’s always been visionary, pushing the limits of what and how imagery can tell a story, but here he outdoes himself, releasing maybe not his most commercial effort but easily his most accomplished.