I am Roma, hear me roar! Alfonso Cuaron’s sub-titled, black-and-white, masterpiece, is 2018’s most incredible feat with all the brilliant possibilities of cinema to come.
When the family patriarch abandons his wife and four children, three women are forced to pick up the pieces together. First there’s the wife, Sofia (Marina DeTavira), then her mother/the children’s grandmother, Señora Teresa (Verónica García),and most importantly, the housekeeper, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). Cleo plants her roots in the family as if already understanding the old adage ‘money doesn’t buy happiness.’
This film is a love letter to the women of our world – mothers, aunts, grandmothers, even step-mothers – who have raised and stood by us. A different type of Reality Housewives, Roma (named for a gated neighborhood of Mexico) shows us what goes on inside both the house…and inside the women.
If this were an American film it might be Upstairs/Downstairsmeets a Mexican Downton Abbeywith staff, maids, housekeepers, nannies, loyalty and integrity. But it’s a foreign film that oddly feels like a larger-than-life war movie, except we go small to the world of a simple maid’s sensitive and personal journey. Her day begins the same – wake the children. They end the same – tuck them to bed. In between she’s dutiful to chores. All at once we know her boundaries, but we’ve yet to understand her choices.
There’s a sense of hindsight amidst the fear-of-the-future…because everything that this woman knows can come tumbling down in a matter of seconds: unwanted pregnancies, broken marriages, riots, massacres, forest fires and even earthquakes drawn from the Writer/Director Afonso Cuaron’s own childhood. Who else could deliver such a stunning portrait of domestic strife amidst political turmoil of the 70s? This is corruption and mediocracy, politics – without being political – and family history, all in the middle of this Herculean-glue that keeps one family together: Cleo.
The actress portraying Cleo – Yalitiza Aparicio – is perfectly cast. As an audience we can’t quite make sense of her. We try to situate her character into definition one way or the other. She seems special. She’s innocent. She’s darling as a gum drop, but she’s also heroic and miraculous. She becomes all women. Rich, poor, girl, woman, mother, muse, and then some.
There’s also the love story that wasn’t. Cleo the “Gringa” is in love with Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerriro) a revolutionary-Martial-arts-bad-boy set against the rich and raw landscape. He has little care for anything but servicing his body…and his ego. At a certain point, Sofia will tell Cleo, “No matter what they tell you – women, we are always alone.”
Roma gives us ebullient visuals. There’s the laundry lingering on the line, the haze of sunshine, birds chirping in a cage, the crack of an egg, Borras the dog and his ‘mess’ all over the driveway, the sound of bus engines, the passing-by of military bands, set against a juxtaposition of lovers swapping saliva in a matinee. It’s the seeing, tasting, and inhaling of a soundscape called south of the border. It’s bringing Cuaron’s own memories to life. And, it makes us ponder. What happens to newborns in a maternity ward during an earthquake? Answer: Gravel and stone crumble to the top of a preemie’s incubator. We hopethat the baby survives.
Cuaron’s last film Gravity was large, expensive, and shot in vast space with a movie star, Sandra Bullock. Roma, is small, a fraction of the cost, contained, and features an unknown actress. What the two have in common is that Cuaron captures with Romawhat he did with Gravity… the desperate understanding of loss and of maternal love.
The movie might be shot in large digital sans color, but like a Paris backdrop – with its fifty versions of crème, parchment, ivory, and beige – Roma washes emotionally washes over us with its grey, greige, black and white.
There have been black-and-white films that astounded us before. Shindler’s List won the Oscar, so did the silent film The Artist (2012), while The Good German(2006) made an earnest attempt at film noir. But none have been written, directed, and edited as Cuaron’s exquisite Roma. Cleo’s body and Cuaron’s camera are one in the pounding ocean waves. There’s no desperation to drown, but instead an understanding of how she’ll conquer the sea, larger than her tiny universe.
Cuaron fills the gap that was once a house, a storefront and a church, to reutilize and repurpose a way of life. Award-winning Mexican author, Valeria Luiselli said it best, “Roma is a revolution but one that is quiet, internal, slow and subtle.”
This is clearly Cuaron’s biographical diary of his childhood. But’s it’s also a movie that will stay with women, long after it’s done. Roma is genius though some viewers won’t be seduced. Nevertheless, it marries the old and the new. The certain things that never change. We’ve been the heartbroken, the fearful, the mother-who-lost-a-child, the wife who lost a husband, the caretaker to those in need.
In the end we learn that women grow to achieve perfection in their pain. Yes, I am Roma…hear me roar!