ROMA
The Mexican
director Alfonso Cuarón’s
career includes a rather unusual variety of works. Like the comedian who has always wanted to
play Hamlet, he apparently disdains the successful mainstream Hollywood films
he has made, while aspiring to something he believes is stronger, truer, perhaps
realer. In addition to the erotic road
movie, Y Tu Mamá Tambien (2001), he
directed Children of Men (2006),
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(2004), and Gravity (2013), pictures
that won both critical praise and box office bucks.
His new film, Roma,
however, brings his focus back to his native country and, according to his own
statements, his family history and background.
Its simple story involves a middle class family living in a suburb of
Mexico City, the Roma of the title; the family consists of the physician
father, the research biologist mother, a grandmother, and three children. The real subject of the picture, and the
character through whose eyes all the people appear and act, is the maid/housekeeper/nanny
Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). The movie opens
with her going about one of her daily tasks, repeated throughout the course of
events, and progresses deliberately through the routine of her days—cleaning,
making beds, helping the cook, obeying the whims of her sometimes capricious
employer (Marina de Taviva), and especially, dealing with the children.
The movie settles into the rhythms of the family’s life,
often set against the troubled background of recent Mexican history—the action
takes place in the 1970s—showing some of the large and small public events of
its time. A small band of uniformed men,
playing a martial tune, marches down their street periodically; a group of
apparent paramilitary trainees engage in some sort of ninja exercises; a
political controversy ignites a demonstration that explodes into vandalism,
violence, and death.
As the country undergoes its struggles and tensions, so does
the family. The father, Antonio
(Fernando Grediaga), claiming initially to be attending what turns out to be a
very long conference, actually leaves his wife and children for another
woman. Cleo’s boyfriend Fermin (Jorge
Antonio Guerrero), one of the militant kung fu fighters, turns out to be a
vicious betrayer, who impregnates her, then refuses to acknowledge either her
or her pregnancy. The focus on Cleo and
the plight of the mother and family emphasizes the strength of the female and
the weakness of the male characters, selfish, cruel, and inadequate.
Filmed in black and white, at times in an almost documentary
style, and somewhat reminiscent of the highly praised Indian film of 1955, Pather Panchali, in its frequent
employment of panoramic shots, Roma
expands its view from the confines of the family household where Cleo works to
the squalid town she visits to confront the angry, faithless Fermin. Its concentration on the family expands along
with the camera’s changing focus, comprehending some of the breadth of the
political violence and its intrusion into Cleo’s life.
Its steadfast fix on Cleo, her endless humdrum chores, her
relationship to the family she works for, and the ultimate resolution of the
marital problems all combine to make Roma
a rather different version of that familiar contemporary genre, the chick
flick. In this movie the women confront
and triumph over adversity, even tragedy, and reaffirm the power of the family
and their love of the children. The film
shows the inadequacy of the males and the growing strength of the females, a
theme far distant from the usual romantic nonsense of the form, and a theme
appropriate to the plot, the characters, and to Roma itself.
