Roma by Alfonso Cuarón (review)

Albeit the eighth film that Alfonso Cuarón has directed, Roma is a film of firsts: the first film in which Cuarón serves as director of photography, Cuarón's first film made in Mexico since Sólo con tu pareja some eighteen years ago, the first Mexican or Latin American film majestically shot on 65mm film stock, the first "serious" Latin American film theatrically distributed by Netflix in select national markets. And while I hesitate to call a slower and more meditative film an evolution in personal style, the film marks an unmistakable turning point, or detour, in Cuarón's oeuvre that nevertheless beckons back to previous films in a dense intertextuality that speaks to a director having morphed into a self-aware auteur: astronauts, a traumatic childbirth, meditations on the maternal, political carnage in the streets, forays to the coast, planes crossing the skies of Mexico City. The intertextuality is not merely a question of a common event or themes across Cuarón's films. When the film's Mixtec protagonist Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is framed from the outside of a car window as she cradles one of the children of the family for whom she works and whom she saved from drowning, the repetition of form in Y tu mamá también is clear. And when Cleo takes in political violence unfolding in the streets from a second-story window of a furniture store, Children of Men comes into play. In a film very much about the director's personal memories, the audiences' memories of Cuarón's other movies can swirl about.

Set in the colonia of Roma in 1970 and 1971, the film is thick with layers of the political, social, and cultural impinging upon the personal. Cleo is one of two maids to an upper-middle-class family residing in Mexico City and in the throes of change after the father abandons his wife and children. Posters for the Partido Revolucionario Institucional cover the streets, a right-wing paramilitary group aligned with the government is trained to eliminate its critics, the Corpus Christi massacre is reenacted in all its brutality and senselessness, and the rancor of unequal land distribution simmers between white elites and rural denizens outside the capital. But again, one can return to form, and the confluences of the local and the national are focalized through Cleo, a name that recalls the maid protagonist in Agnès Varda's famous film. Cleo's perspective enables the skeins of gender, class, and race to get entangled but rarely in a resolute and feel-good way. Cleo is the help and occupies a liminal status. She is Mexican, but her indigeneity sets her apart from the family. She lives with the family, but she and Adela, another Mixtec maid, sleep in a separate apartment in which they are forbidden to use the lights at night. Cleo lounges and relaxes with the family watching a television show highlighting the physical feats of Professor Zovek (Latin Lover), only until she is asked to make tea. Cleo and Sofía (Marina de Tavira), the mother and abandoned wife, share common yet distinct misfortunes. After she arrives home after a night on the town, Sofía proclaims to Cleo: "No importa lo que te digan: siempre estamos solas." Such a sentiment could not ring more true when Cleo is physically threatened by Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), the man who impregnates her, and in the haunting and cruel scene when Cleo gives birth to a stillborn daughter. Indeed, Roma contains its horror, but with touches of muted comedy and a city whose routines do not cease: a military band marches, planes take off, laundry is hung, and dogs shit. And cinema and popular culture offer little refuge or purity: Professor Zovek helps train the paramilitaries; Cleo is initially ghosted by Fermín in one of Mexico City's now shuttered movie palaces; and Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey), one of the family's sons, sees, but tries to unsee, his father carousing with a woman...