ROMA

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.