Alfonso Cuarón (2018)

About halfway through Roma, some of the main characters go to the cinema together.  The movie showing is Marooned, a John Sturges picture of 1969 in which ‘Three American astronauts are stranded in space when their retros won’t fire’ (IMDB).   Sounds familiar …  and the brief clip from Marooned that appears on the screen can hardly fail to bring to mind Gravity.  (The reference must be intentional.)  In most other ways,  the neo-realist drama Roma is remarkably different from Alfonso Cuarón’s previous film.

Set in 1970 and 1971, Roma – which Cuarón also wrote, photographed, co-edited and co-produced – is inspired by his own upbringing in an affluent middle-class family in the ‘Colonia Roma’ district of Mexico City.  Cuarón was born in 1961 and it’s fair to suppose that the family’s eccentric, imaginative youngest child Pepe (Marco Graf), who talks matter-of-factly about what he did before he was born, is the film-maker’s alter ego.  Pepe’s older siblings are Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey), Paco (Carlos Peralta) and Sofi (Daniela Demesa).  Their parents are Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), a hospital doctor, and Sofía (Marina De Tavira), a biochemist.  The ménage also includes Sofía’s elderly mother Teresa (Verónica García) and a dog called Borras.  But the central character is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the family’s maid, who shares household duties with another live-in servant, Adela (Nancy García García).

From the very start, Roma is unusual – and not only because it’s shot in a limpid monochrome.  The titles appear against a shot of soapy water slopping over a tiled floor, the rhythmical image repeated to nearly hypnotic effect.  A passing aeroplane, tiny in the distance, is reflected in the water.  (Cuarón announces the ending of the film with the reappearance of a distant plane.)  Roma‘s opening sequence is one of several in which the camera seems fascinated by what it’s observing but Cuarón’s compositions, though artfully ingenious, are never only that.  The water overture is eventually revealed to be part of Cleo’s and Adela’s domestic drill, which is then described more fully.  When Antonio returns that evening, he parks his car in the narrow tiled driveway with great care and the camerawork replicates his close attention.  The precision parking and the gathering to greet the man of the house combine to give his homecoming an oddly ceremonial quality.  This makes sense in retrospect because we won’t see it happen again.  Antonio, who is having an affair with another woman, will soon leave the family home for good.

The front door opens straight onto the street.  The tiled driveway lies between the entry and the main living area.  Each time someone opens the front door, they have to be careful not to let Borras out.  Cleo and Adela repeatedly clean up his excrement from the driveway.  The dog-related procedures, an unstressed and effective means of helping to develop a sense of domestic routine, are significant in another way – one that connects to a more important theme in Roma.  While Borras’s owners are clearly fond of him, it’s thoughtless to confine continuously to barracks a pet that needs regular exercise.   (A small area of the house that’s open to the sky supplies the dog’s only fresh air.)  And although they’re decent and responsible employers, the family take Cleo’s and Adela’s subservience for granted.  Cleo is, as well as a cook and a cleaner, responsible for most of the childcare.  Although she gets time off, she isn’t seen to have a life of her own – not, at least, until her personal circumstances change in a way potentially inconvenient to the brittle Sofía, who is increasingly oppressed by her collapsing marriage.  It seems one of Cuarón’s main aims in Roma is to celebrate a woman who, in his childhood, was simply always there and supportive.  He wants belatedly to recognise there was more going on in her world than he was able to see, to imagine what that world might have been.

The visit to Marooned isn’t the only cinema outing in the film.  On their afternoon off, Adela and Cleo go there with their boyfriends, Ramón (José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza) and Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) respectively.  Only Adela and Ramón stay:  Cleo and Fermín decide to rent a room for an hour or two instead.  Not long afterwards, Cleo suspects she’s pregnant and it’s in a movie theatre that she tells Fermín this.  He’s fine about it, then gets up, saying he needs a toilet urgently.  He doesn’t reappear and Cleo doesn’t see him again until, through Ramón, she tracks him down.  Fermín then refuses to acknowledge the child as his.  He skedaddles again.  After giving birth to a stillborn baby, Cleo, although depressed, fully resumes her household role.

The time and place in which Roma is set have a personal resonance for sports fans of my generation:  as a bedroom wall poster in the film confirms, Mexico has just hosted the 1970 World Cup; two years earlier, the Olympics were held in Mexico City.  Although most of the film’s action takes place there, two major episodes are located elsewhere.  In the first of these, Cleo and Adela accompany Sofía and the children on a visit to a family friend’s hacienda for New Year 1971.  Cleo, drinking a toast, has the cup she’s using knocked from her hand and it breaks on the floor:  the moment is startling though a bit portentous (it somewhat echoes the spilt drops of wine that signal ill fortune at the wedding in The Deer Hunter).  But the staging of the following sequence, when fire breaks out in a forest outside the house where the New Year celebrations are taking place, is stunning.   (In  earlier conversations, both the landowners and workers on the estate have mentioned increasing tensions over ownership of the land.)  The night-time blaze is, in the proper sense of the word, awesome.  People race out of the house with buckets of water to try to put out the fire.  A man dressed in some kind of hairy monster outfit – he’s referred to as ‘the bogeyman’ – sings a curious song with a melancholy melody and lyrics that, frustratingly, are un-subtitled.

The second holiday episode occurs late in the film, at the Veracruz beach resort of Tuxpan, where Sofía takes the children and Cleo, not long after the latter has lost her baby.  The trip is meant to help Cleo recover although it turns out to be precisely timed by Sofía:  it allows Antonio to collect his possessions from the family home while she and the children are away.  Sofía takes the opportunity of the holiday to tell the kids that she and Antonio are splitting up.  The mother is portrayed increasingly unsympathetically:  on their last day at Tuxpan, she leaves Paco, Sofi and Pepe in Cleo’s care, even though she can’t swim and the two older children are in the sea.   They ignore warnings not to go in further and get into difficulty.  Cleo selflessly wades in and somehow gets them and herself back to the shore.  This isn’t just a notably dynamic piece of film-making:  Cleo’s devotion and the knowledge of what she has recently gone through make the sea rescue emotionally as well as literally oceanic.

Sofía returns, there’s a relieved, tearful group hug, Cleo is thanked and told how much the family loves her.  She says she loves them too and confesses she didn’t want to have her baby.  That distressing, believable admission gives renewed and revised impact to an earlier scene in a hospital delivery room.  Even in a film that contains several brilliant sequences, this one stands out.  The doctors can’t detect a heartbeat while the baby is still in the womb.   After giving birth, Cleo lies in bed as, in the same shot, the medical team abortively attempts resuscitation on the newborn.  The new mother’s attention is so focused on the CPR that she hardly reacts to the medical staff removing the placenta and giving her stitches.  Cleo’s anguished breathing and the medics’ voices as they repeat and repeat the CPR routine combine powerfully on the soundtrack.  Once the baby is pronounced dead, a doctor – professionally compassionate yet businesslike – offers the corpse to Cleo so that she can ‘meet’ then ‘say goodbye’ to her daughter.

Roma is impressively balanced.  It’s an extraordinarily natural dramatisation of boisterous fun, arguments and secrets within a family.   It revolves around a main character whom it places within a particular and vividly convincing larger context.  Cuarón builds the political dimension of the story skilfully and the character of Cleo’s dodgy, engaging boyfriend contributes importantly to this.   On the afternoon they rent a room instead of watching a film, Fermín shows off to Cleo his martial arts skills, completely naked and using a shower curtain pole as a prop weapon.  He proudly tells Cleo that martial arts training has been a route out of the anarchic poverty and criminal culture in which he grew up.  The display, both startling and comical at the time, becomes alarming in the light of later events.   When, after his hasty departure from the cinema, Cleo finally finds Fermín again, he’s participating in a mass outdoor martial arts class.  This takes place in a huge, largely barren landscape that seems to reflect the anomic world from which Fermín and others have developed into ‘warriors’.

In the early part of the film, the political unrest for which Mexico City was notorious in the late 1960s and early 1970s is in evidence only in the characters’ conversations or as sounds in the distance.   This changes on the day Teresa takes Cleo shopping for a crib in a city centre department store (an instance of how Cleo’s employers, partly but not entirely out of self-interest, do right by their servant).  A student demonstration is taking place.  The atmosphere is already tense as Teresa’s driver Ignacio (Andy Cortés) parks in a backstreet and ushers the two women into the store from a side entrance.  Inside, they stand at a window watching the police and military laying into demonstrators outside[1].  Suddenly, the mayhem is happening inside the store.  A couple of wounded demonstrators rush in, trying to escape pursuing gunmen.  One of the latter shoots one of the two demonstrators dead as terrified customers try to take cover.  Another man points a gun at Cleo:  it’s Fermín.  He registers Cleo before running out of the store (the third time he’s left her at speed).  The next moment, her waters break.  The collision of events sounds melodramatic and perhaps Cuarón is forcing things into a too neat pattern here.  Yet the scene works on an emotional level and metaphorically too, as a reflection of the inescapability of Mexico’s prevailing political turbulence.

Alfonso Cuarón shows controlled flair throughout and it’s not only in the story’s most intense moments that Roma is exciting to watch.  Take, for example, the sequence in which the family are on their way to the cinema showing Marooned.  Cuarón captures the movement of a crowded city street with such animation that we feel – and are thrilled to feel – we’re actually experiencing the life of a vanished time.  The film isn’t short (135 minutes) yet it feels economical – nothing is visually or dramatically surplus to requirements.  Yalitza Aparicio, whose first screen role this is, is outstanding in the lead.  Among the supporting cast, Verónica García and Jorge Antonio Guerrero do particularly good work.  The dialogue, which is mostly in Spanish, also includes some Mixtec[2] (Cleo is of Mixteco heritage).  Whether, as some are predicting, Roma becomes the first-ever foreign language film to win the Best Picture Oscar obviously remains to be seen.  (The distribution by Netflix, as well as the subtitles, could count against it.)  It’s certainly the best film of the eleven I saw at this year’s London Film Festival.

14 October 2018

[1] This is presumably the ‘Corpus Christi Massacre’ of 10 June 1971, the day of the Corpus Christi festival.

[2] According to Wikipedia, ‘The Mixtec …languages belong to the Otomanguean language family of Mexico, and are closely related to the Trique and Cuicatec languages, together with which they form the Mixtecan branch of the family. They are spoken by over half a million people’.