December 24, 2018 6 min to read

Roma

Roma is Cuarón’s deeply personal magnum opus - and it’s in a different stratosphere than any other film in 2018. Congrats to everyone involved - it’s an absolute masterpiece.

by Zach Saul

When a movie is made with as much love as Roma it bleeds off the screen. It may not win best picture at the Oscars, but no movie was made with more love, care, and compassion in 2018 than Cuarón’s Roma. The movie follows the life and times of a maid named Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) and the family she cares for is the Roma neighborhood of Mexico city in the 70s. The family depends on Cleo and another maid Adela (Nancy García García) to wrangle their four kids and take care of the cooking and cleaning for their estate. When the family’s breadwinner Doctor Antonio leaves on a business trip, things get complicated quickly as his wife Sofia (Marina de Tavira) discovers her husband is lying about the reason for his absence. To make matters worse, Cleo gets pregnant and the baby’s father goes MIA leaving her scared and alone. Cleo track down her baby’s father Fermín, only to discover he’s involved in a bizarre cult-like militia (we discover later Cuarón is referencing Corpus Christi massacre of 1971). On the day of the student demonstration, Cleo is shopping for a crib and the police open fire on the crowd causing mass hysteria and panic.

Roma has a really distinct visual style, and despite the disturbing events we saw onscreen I left with an overwhelmingly romantic impression of life in Mexico City. Cuarón’s big achievement is that he manages to speak seriously about the transgressions of the men in the film while also delighting in showing us the beauty of a life spent in Roma. The new year’s parties, playful table arguments, and shots of the buzzing city streets are wistful. All of the women in Roma treat the children and each other with unbelievable respect and dignity, and when one examines Roma from a child’s vantage point there’s plenty to feel nostalgic about.

Cleo’s enduring kindness and resilience are a constant for these kids, and that bond helps the kids through the departure of their dad. Cleo is able to overcome feeling sorry for herself and the death of her child because of the bond she feels towards this family. The movie doesn’t explicitly say as much - but one could imagine some part of Cleo blamed herself for her miscarriage. The final scene in which she rescues Paco, Sofi, Tono & Pepe felt like her redemptive moment, choosing love over misery and “claiming” these kids as partly hers.

Despite Yalitza Aparicio’s brilliance as Cleo, the character I enjoyed most in the movie was Senora Sofia - who you could argue shouldered the most responsibility of any of these women. Cuarón draws Sofia as an emotionally complex character in conflict - and is willing to let her make mistakes and then attone for them. On more than one occasion we see Sofia snapping sharply at her children or Cleo unfairly. However, when the circumstances are most challenging - Senora Sofia is at her best. When Cleo tearfully confesses her pregnancy, Sofia doesn’t blink and expresses unconditional support which was immeasurably important to Cleo. When her husband leaves for good, and Sofia is left to tend to four children and a emotionally distraught maid in crisis - she displays an unimaginable strength and tends to everyone’s needs. Not to mention, it was Sofia, not Dr. Antonio who summoned the courage to tell their children about the divorce - despite it not being her fault. She represented everything that the men in Roma failed to be: present, and emotionally available to the people who needed them.

Cuarón’s movie is loudly trumpeting how silly he finds male chauvinism, never more poignantly than when we see Fermín literally and metaphorically whipping his dick at a bemused Cleo. Fermín claims he owes his life to martial arts, but then when we get to see the cult-like training ground where he practices (and the doofus in spandex leading them in a blind tree-pose) it’s clear we’re not to take him even a half an ounce seriously. The male chauvinism Cuarón is pointing at isn’t always overt though: Antonio isn’t ever rude and aggressive onscreen like Fermin is. Instead he’s portrayed as completely apathetic, absent and without a sense of obligation. When Cleo shows up in Dr. Antonio’s hospital to deliver her baby, he pretends to care, and makes up an excuse to avoid having to be present in the delivery room. This represents a consistent theme throughout the movie of men understanding just enough about what’s expected of them to pretend to engage, and then failing to show up when it matters.

There’s manny symbols I left Roma thinking about but one in particular stood out: the cars Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) and Sofia both drove. The first time Dr. Antonio comes home, he takes about fifty turns to enter the driveway as his family waits with forced grins for him to exit the car. The tone is satirical, and Cuarón is inviting the audience to laugh at his father’s (it’s safe to assume Cuarón is one of the children in this story) obsessive parking habits. Sofia is no better - as she tries to squeeze their family car between two trucks at a stoplight egregiously scraping all three vehicles. Then in a third scene Sofia drives home emotional after confronting her cheating husband and smashes her car and and driveway violently. I read the cars and the family’s lack of regard for them as a sign of emotional distress and a disconnect between the economic status they had on the surface, and the internal emotional status they felt as Sofia came to terms with Dr. Antonio’s departure. As the tension builds and Sofia’s predicament gets more serious the tone shifts darker and her reckless driving isn’t just comic relief—it parallels the deterioration of her marital/family life.

The Good: Roma is gorgeous, funny, heartbreaking, and moving. Cuarón’s investment in the material is palpable, and the all-spanish cast deliver outstanding performances. This is the type of movie that would keep a film-class busy for an entire semester, and that could be paused at just about any point and hung on a wall. Roma deserves best picture for 2018, but almost certainly won’t get it because of its presence on Netflix, subtitles, and unknown cast.

The Bad: Netflix should absolutely be championed for giving this movie an audience it probably wouldn’t have received otherwise. But the consequence of it being available on a streaming site is that way too many people are going to end up watching this film at home instead of on the big screen where it belongs…and that’s a damn shame because they’ll miss it’s full effect.