Roma

Like many Westerners, I first heard of Alfonso Cuarón when he helmed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. While he had been working as a director since the early 1990s, most of his work was in his native Mexico, with the sole exceptions being A Little Princess (a fantasy film that barely made back half of its budget) and the 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations, a star-filled period piece that made money but fizzled with the critics and has gone mostly forgotten since.  

Since the 2000s, though, his name has been synonymous with quality features. Harry Potter, of course, was just shooting fish in a barrel, guaranteed to be a hit, but it is still considered by many to be the best made of the entire series. He followed that up with Children of Men, a dystopian future film where births have all but ceased in the world. Gravity, in 2013, was a showcase for Sandra Bullock and for 3D filming. His most recent film, to date, though, was a much more personal film: Roma. 

This film is a semi-autobiographical look back on Cuarón’s childhood and upbringing in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma neighborhood in the 1970s. Cuarón is not only looking back at this time period but he is also exploring themes of gender politics and class separation. We are seeing all of this through the eyes of Cleodegaria “Cleo” Gutiérrez (Yalitza Aparicio), a Mixtec live-in maid in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. 

She works for Sofía (Marina de Tavira), providing maid services while also looking after the four children of Sofía, their grandmother, and her often absent husband, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga).  Antonio is frequently leaving on business trips that are a front for his many affairs. This will eventually culminate with him choosing to leave the family, divorcing Sofía. 

Cleo is in a relationship with Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), a young man committed to his martial arts training. When she tells him that she may be pregnant, he pretends to be supportive but abandons her in a movie theater and disappears. When she tracks him down, he berates her and threatens her and her unborn baby if she ever comes to see him again. As the baby’s delivery date approaches, Cleo, while shopping for a crib, is caught in the middle of the Corpus Christi Massacre of 10 June 1971. While she is not attacked directly, she does see Fermín there, participating in the massacre, prompting her to go into labor early, losing the baby. 

As mentioned above, we see early on that there is a significant divide between Cleo and Sofía. While Sofía is not an absent mother, she does leave the rearing of her children mostly to Cleo. The same goes for the pet dog, whom we see Cleo having to clean up afterwards. She is not treated poorly, but she is not treated like an equal, either. Sofía, at one point, insists that Cleo accompany her and the kids on a trip to the ocean. Not only does she have to point out to the kids that Cleo is going to be on vacation, too, and not there as their servant, but later, when two of the kids get into trouble in the waters, caught up in the current, Cleo is the one to rescue them, not Sofía, even though Cleo cannot swim. She cannot escape that subservient role that she is in. 

No matter the class level, both women are treated like disposable pleasures by the men in their lives. Sofía clings to her husband, knowing that he is off to have another of a long series of affairs. She tolerates it, even though she does express her anger with him from time to time. When he finally calls for a divorce, it devastates her, and she comes home drunk and in despair. Likewise, despite being abandoned when she discovers that she is pregnant, Cleo actively goes looking for Fermín. It takes him threatening her and her unborn baby to get her to back off. It’s his sudden reappearance, participating in the Corpus Christi Massacre, that causes her water to break early and for her to lose the baby. Alfonso Cuarón is playing on coincidences and obvious parallels to make his point, but he is doing so in a way that feels right. 

Roma is not going to appeal to the masses. It’s a slow-paced story that is thin on actual plot but rich on ambience and themes. Critics raved about it at the time, and it scored several Academy Award nominations that year, but audiences didn’t flock to theaters, partly because it was releasing soon afterwards on Netflix. It’s the type of arthouse film that appeals to those who take films seriously and is ignored by everyone else who just wants to be entertained with spectacle and shallowness. In short, it’s the kind of film people complain about when referring to the Oscars; a film that is highly regarded by critics but no one has heard of. Were I to mention Roma to anyone in my peer group, I doubt I’d find a single person who has heard of it, let alone seen it. And that is too bad, too, because there is a lot to unpack in this film. It’s not the most engaging film out there, but it is not boring. It leaves a lot to be discussed after it ends, which, for me, translates to a win. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Gabriela Rodríguez and Alfonso Cuarón

Best Director: Alfonso Cuarón (won)

Best Actress: Yalitza Aparicio

Best Supporting Actress: Marina de Tavira

Best Original Screenplay: Alfonso Cuarón

Best Foreign Language Film: Mexico (won)

Best Cinematography: Alfonso Cuarón (won)

Best Production Design: Eugenio Caballero and Bárbara Enríquez

Best Sound Editing: Sergio Díaz and Skip Lievsay

Best Sound Mixing: Skip Lievsay, Craig Henighan, and José Antonio García

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Release Date: November 21, 2018

Running Time: 135 minutes

Rated R

Starring: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, and Jorge Antonio Guerrero

Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón