The
climactic family road trip in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” which stars
Yalitza Aparicio, center, as a middle-class Mexico City family’s maid.CreditCarlos Somonte/Netflix
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- Roma
- NYT Critic's Pick
- Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
- Drama
- R
- 2h 15m
In
“Roma,” the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón uses a large canvas to tell
the story of lives that some might think small. A personal epic set in
Mexico City in the early 1970s, it centers on a young indigenous woman
who works as a maid for a middle-class white family that’s falling
apart. Cuarón uses one household on one street to open up a world,
working on a panoramic scale often reserved for war stories, but with
the sensibility of a personal diarist. It’s an expansive, emotional
portrait of life buffeted by violent forces, and a masterpiece.
Few
directors tell large-scale stories with as much sensitivity as Cuarón,
whose filmmaking style has grown more exhilarating as the expressive
realism of his breakout movie, “Y Tu Mamá También,” has been channeled
into the restrained ostentation of his fantasies “Children of Men” and
“Gravity.” In “Roma” he has further refined his style by marshaling
various narrative strategies, including cinematic spectacle. Many
directors use spectacle to convey larger-than-life events while
reserving devices like close-ups to express a character’s inner being.
Here, Cuarón uses both intimacy and monumentality to express the depths
of ordinary life.
“Roma” shares its
name with a neighborhood in Mexico City where families live behind
locked gates, and where maids, cooks and drivers busily keep homes
running. In one such house, Cleo (the newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) lives
with and works for a multigenerational brood that scarcely seems capable
of doing anything without her. In the morning, she wakes the children;
at night, she puts them to bed. From each dawn and until long after
dusk, she tends to the family and its sprawling two-story house. She
serves meals, cleans away dog droppings and carries laundry up to the
roof, where she does the wash in view of other maids on other roofs with
their own heavy loads.
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The
movie opens in 1970 with scenes that establish Cleo’s everyday routine
and, by extension, the parameters of her life. Much of the movie takes
place inside the house (a re-creation of Cuarón’s childhood home), which
is flanked by a gated, open-roofed passage filled with bicycles,
plants, caged birds and an exuberant, underloved dog named Borras. Cleo
and her friend Adela (Nancy García), the family cook, live at the end of
the corridor in a tiny, cramped upstairs room. The women are from the
same village in the southern state of Oaxaca and fluidly slip between
Spanish and Mixtec, their native tongue, as they share gossip and sober news from home.
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A
series of catastrophes slowly upends the stability of this world,
starting with a business trip the father takes that proves calamitous.
There’s also an earthquake, a shattered window, an unexpected pregnancy,
death and betrayal. In one of the most astonishing sequences, Cleo and
the family’s grandmother, Señora Teresa (Verónica García), watch a
student demonstration turn into a police riot through the window of a
furniture showroom. Cuarón doesn’t identify the incident — known as the
Corpus Christi Massacre of 1971 — but fills in that day with visceral,
harrowing flashes of chaotic violence, including a pietà-like image of a
woman crying for help while cradling a dying man.
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Cuarón
served as the director of photography for “Roma,” and his work here is
astonishing. He shot the movie in black-and-white, large-format digital,
creating images that have extraordinary clarity, detail and tonality,
with entire rainbows of gray, black and white. Like Cleo, the camera is
often mobile, anticipating and following her movements like a faithful
companion. Cuarón is conversant in Hollywood storytelling but here he
also makes expressive use of the kind of tableau staging — arranging
people in the frame — that is more familiar from art cinema. By letting a
scene play out without much editing, he lets us see how each of these
characters inhabits these specific spaces.
Although “Roma” is autobiographical,
Cuarón doesn’t explicitly announce it as such. The family’s four
children — a girl and three boys, one presumably based on the director —
tend to blur into a cacophonous, charming little mob and you catch
their names only in passing. The father (Fernando Grediaga) first
appears onscreen in a series of cubistic close-ups — a pack of
cigarettes and a lighter, two hands casually holding a car wheel — that
suggest he isn’t wholly present or knowable. The lumbering Ford Galaxy
that he meticulously coaxes into the narrow corridor, inching forward
and back, a car mirror nearly brushing a wall, suggests his isolation
from a family that he soon abandons.
From left, Yalitza Aparicio, Diego Cortina Autrey and Marina De Tavira in a scene from “Roma.”CreditCarlos Somonte/Netflix
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The
mother, Sofía (Marina De Tavira), is more present, though still less so
than Cleo, the children’s surrogate parent. Sofía is unfairly berated
by her husband and she, in turn, rebukes Cleo, a chain of exploitation
that Cuarón represents coolly, occasionally letting a camera movement — a
pan of the immaculate house — comment for him. “Roma” doesn’t have a
strong story; there are no inciting incidents or mysteries to solve.
Instead, in scene after scene, Cuarón creates a fine-grained vision of a
woman and a world shaped by a colonialist past that inexorably weighs
down the present, most conspicuously in a surreal interlude filled with
guns, servants and a conflagration.
Cuarón’s
authorial voice becomes progressively more conspicuous through his
visual choices, his staging and camerawork. Much happens, but in
fragments that slide together as the family and larger sociopolitical
forces come into focus. In an early meal scene, one of the boys casually
mentions seeing a soldier fatally shoot a kid who was throwing water
balloons at an army jeep. He begins speaking over a close-up of Cleo’s
hands as she prepares a plate of food, an image that makes the brutality
feel quotidian. In another scene, Cuarón punctuates a shot of the
parents and children watching TV with one of Cleo seated next to them on
the floor, a child’s arm draped on her body.
Cuarón
wrote as well as edited “Roma”; he folds just enough exposition into
ordinary-sounding conversations to keep you tethered and doesn’t step on
the story by overcutting it. You don’t necessarily know who the
children in lederhosen are in one sequence, but their outfits, casual
wealth and taxidermy menagerie could fill volumes. Mostly, he speaks
through his visuals, particularly the camerawork that alternately
articulates his and Cleo’s points of view. You see what she sees and
also view her from a distance, but at times — as in a scene in which she
wades into violently crashing waves, the camera steadily moving
parallel with her — the movie seems to embody her being.
This
is a stunning sequence that’s viscerally terrifying and emotionally
overwhelming. Yet it also invokes the oceanic feeling of a being at one
with the universe that dovetails with a climactic family road trip. You
feel both Cuarón’s presence and Cleo’s in this vision of her
determinedly pushing against the threatening waves, an image he has
dredged from the past and made alive through memory. “Roma” is dedicated
to Liboria Rodríguez (“for Libo”), the woman who raised him in a house
like the one in this movie, where every so often you can see a jet
passing overhead, a vision that points to a distant, peripatetic future,
even as it suggests that Cuarón never left this place, its women and
its love.
Roma
Rated R. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Rated R. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lives Magnified by Memory. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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