Alfonso Cuarón wrote, directed and shot this exceptional, intensely personal film based on his own childhood. Roma is not your ordinary film, let alone foreign language film. Filmed in Black and White, we found it took a little time to get used to the visual style the award winning Director (Gravity) chose to present his story. It is a film that stays with you.
We weren’t sure we really liked, or understood the messages of the film right away, but weren’t able to stop thinking about how the visuals affected us. This is a melodrama set in the 1970’s. You will feel as though you are living the life of this family in their day-to-day existence in Mexico City with every nuance laid out to explore. Roma is the district of Mexico City where the family resides.
Cuarón had been thinking about making this film for 10 years, as a tribute to the women who raised him. His vision is simple, yet complicated in the details following the mother, grandmother, children, and the central character who became their extended family, Cleo.
We spoke with two of the stars of this film at the Chicago International Film Festival. Yalitza Aparicio, plays Cleo, the housekeeper/nanny to four children of a doctor and his wife. Aparicio had never acted a day in her life, But she is exactly what Cuarón wanted. Yalitza went along with her sister who auditioned. No one was more surprised than Yalitza when she got the part.
Marina de Tavira is an actress from Mexico City who has worked in TV and Film (Falco, The Lord of the Skies). Her character is modeled after Cuarón’s mother whose husband leaves her to fend for herself and the household. De Tavira told us that working with the first-time actress Aparicio was easy. But both women had their challenges because Cuarón never let the actors nor the crew, see a script. He’d explain their characters, and what the scene was about and let them go. No problem for Aparicio. She’d never acted before anyway. She thought this is how all movies are made.
Cuarón uses long scenes of menial tasks right from the opening of the film, pouring water to wash a floor in the driveway to clean dog droppings. But he makes it almost beautiful, reflecting the sky as the water is poured in waves across the tile. He even captures the reflection of a passenger jet moving through the soapy water. It’s a wonder how he imagined such an amazing shot, even if it came up by chance.
Later in the film, his slow pans from the living room searching for activity in different rooms of the house while showing the artifacts, books, and trappings of the people living there, gives the family personality without dialogue. Cuarón gathered furniture and more items from his relatives all over Mexico to dress the set. He wanted to bring his recollection of it to life.
There are funny scenes with the kids and with the Señora, including one showing her as an inexperienced driver. Her navigation pulling into the very tight driveway is shot low from the fenders and side panels of the car. The fits and starts and sounds of screeching metal will make you wince and laugh.
Cuarón makes it clear in the film that Cleo has no control over her own life, let alone the members of the family. She is the caretaker, working her butt off and doing whatever is necessary to make others more comfortable without having a say in any of it, or her own life.
Cleo’s blank stares are anything but blank. Her silence is necessary and notable. The gaze of her eyes expresses that she is confused, fearful, tentative, yet always restrained. Cleo is an outsider, a member of the indigenous Mexican population. She came down from the hills to work and speaks a different language, Mextico, which is used in subtitles as well as Spanish.
Cleo has been taken in as a servant, but she becomes much more. Mostly treated well, especially by the children, she becomes family. When she falls in love and becomes impregnated by a man who abandons her, the Señora and the Grandmother step up to help even though Señora Sofia is dealing with her own husband’s infidelity.
The “love scene” with Cleo and her boyfriend is bizarre. Cuarón has him completely nude, bouncing around the room showing off his martial arts moves using a shower curtain rod as his weapon. But Cleo glows with love for him and the attention she is getting. Unfortunately, it does not last.
Harmony in the city does not last either. Clashes between the classes result in protests which the director shows as Cleo and the Grandmother are trying to pick out baby furniture for Cleo who is pregnant. You see rioting in the streets below from the second story windows of the store juxtaposed with Cleo there for a happier occasion, just to get furniture for her baby. The scenes of Cleo delivering her baby are gut wrenching and so graphic. For that scene alone, Yalitza should be recognized for her performance.
There are even more problems for the Señora trying to figure out how to take care of everything by herself. Cuarón shows how she is trying to keep everything together with a family field trip to have a picnic, and to go to the “playa,” the beach. Aparicio admitted in the interview that the beach scene was her most difficult because Cuarón told her to dive in to swim against the waves. One problem. Aparicio does not know how to swim. The director was able to talk her into it, assuring she’d be safe, or saved if anything happened and it is important to the scene and the movie.
The messages of the film revolve around accepting and loving the people around you and how they shape who you are, particularly that sometimes those not related by blood become family. Yes, this film is a masterpiece of storytelling and filmmaking. It’s an emotional expression of a time Cuarón wanted to hold onto forever by chronicling it in detail on film. From helping Cleo hang laundry, to rides in the car with the whole family, spending meal time, fun time and quiet time together, Cuarón has created an exquisite film with visually intricate scenes of his loving childhood so that we can relive his life vicariously.
Netflix 2 hours 15 minutes R
