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Wednesday 16 January 2019

Day 264: Wednesday Reviews - Roma

Alfonso Cuarón’s latest film, financed by and streaming to Netflix, is a wonder. An ode to women struggling grandly against the quotidian and occasionally tragic, Cuarón mines his childhood growing up in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City in the 1970s to deliver a stunning portrait of Cleo, a Mixteco Mesoamerican housekeeper living in the home of an upper-class white Mexican family, cooking their meals, washing their clothes, mopping up the stains of dog shit daily from their drive.

The pace is leisurely, measured, yet unyielding. A freight train coming on five miles an hour, stopping for nothing. Cuarón frames his characters mostly in mid and long shots, situating them within their environments - including the house, used for filming, across the street from Cuarón’s childhood home, decorated in his family’s own furniture - and these spaces are brought exquisitely to life in stately camera pans and long holds, which, though almost lethargic at times, are tightly controlled, building a sense of inhabited places.

Within this sluggish, ethereal world, filmed in gorgeous monochrome, we gradually get to know Cleo and the family for whom she works. The family, perhaps excepting the mostly absent father, all care for, even love, Cleo, and yet Cuarón doesn’t absolve them of blame for their culpability in her suffering. Cleo may laugh along with the jokes on the small television set the family watch in the evenings, but she must clear plates as she laughs, prepare the teas, continue on with her ceaseless chores. The mother, overall a gentle and thoughtful employer, is not above chastising Cleo when her own problems become too great, using Cleo as an emotional punching bag, taking out her anger at her failing marriage on the encumbered help. 

Cleo is well-treated, but the line between family and employee is clear, if mostly implicit. In a telling scene, the family, with Cleo, visit friends in a holiday retreat. The walls of the villa are decorated with the heads of dead dogs, pets of the owners, stuffed and mounted on the walls. Cleo stands a long time taking in these silent heads, pondering her own existence. Will she one day be mounted in a cabinet so that her family may remember her fondly when her loyal service is complete?



The film unfolds gently, in this manner, even as cracks begin to form, and tragedies surface. The story is set against the backdrop of Mexico’s larger upheaval, centering on the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971, with the violence that has been inexorably brewing in the country eventually, and literally, bursting into the suburban idyll in which the family reside. In this way Cuarón cleverly ties the personal and the political, the familial and the national, making the dual woes of Cleo and the family’s mother feel as inevitable as the greater shifting of the world.

And yet there is grace and strength to be found within the heartache, and even room for those class barriers that separate Cleo to, if not break down, at least strain. Boundaries are never as fixed as we first think, and the lives that Cuarón presents are complicated, ambiguous, and the family members are rich characters, struggling with their own very real concerns.

But the film belongs to Cleo, and is vivified by a powerful, naturalistic performance by first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio, bringing to the role a sense of restrained, stubborn calm and Ivan-Denisovich-like courage in the face of toil.

The image of a jet plane overhead subtly marks the opening, midpoint, and closing of the film, with the character of a martial arts trainer lecturing to a crowd at the midpoint that you should not expect of him miracles like "levitation, or lifting a jet" - his greatest feat is simply being able to balance on one leg with his eyes closed, a skill that the assembled masses attempt, and fail - all with the exception of Cleo, who is watching, unnoticed, from the sidelines.

The meaning is clear. Greatness is often marked, although rarely noted, not by the actions of the powerful and the famous, the high flyers, but by the millions down here on the ground, wrestling with, and enduring, countenancing - transforming - the secret suffering of daily existence. The many who labour on, quietly, at their lot in life. 

Cleo is one such saint. The woman to whom the film is dedicated - Cuarón’s own childhood nanny, “Libo” - is perhaps another.

Roma is an eloquent and essential piece of cinema. I highly recommend it.

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