Roma is firmly rooted in a specific time and place: the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City from 1970 through 1971. I didn’t even know THAT going in! It follows Cleo, the live in servant for a doctor’s family, played by Yalitza Aparicio, the first Indigenous American woman nominated for an Oscar in her debut role. It was released in theaters for a limited time, but is available via streaming on Netflix. Alfonso Cuaron directed it and is well known for other films such as A Little Princess, Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which is personally notable as the only Harry Potter film that I saw, Children of Men and Gravity. He was also a producer in Pan’s Labyrinth. The wide variety of his work shows his versatility, but Roma specifically represents a return home since Y Tu Mama Tambien, which I saw, but barely recall.
Not everything is made for you, but just because it isn’t made for you, doesn’t mean that you can’t appreciate it or try to be open to others’ critiques and praise. I actually saw Roma two times: once in the theater on March 5, 2019 then last night at home on Netflix. The first time, I definitely felt like an outsider watching it because I did not understand the context, but it helped that I was in a theater completely immersed in the objective beauty of each shot’s composition and surrounded by the quotidian sounds of this life. I felt a sense of foreboding (the dogs live), but no idea what goal the story seemed to be ambling towards. Having other strangers, also outsiders, to discuss this film with helped me meditate on what I just saw. I went home then read about all the historical and cultural references that I didn’t understand while watching the movie, but intuited that it had deeper meaning.
Roma improves with multiple viewings. Once I knew the overall story, I could fully appreciate how the camera movement, the scope of each frame and composition of each shot fully and masterfully told the story before it unfolded. I would recommend that you pay close attention to the following themes: the relationship of water and Cleo from the opening shot to the end, the tension between the earth and the sky, especially the movement between the two since the camera movement is usually horizontal, the role of violence in daily life as entertainment to visceral threat; the sudden eruption of mortal danger at peaceful moments; the relationship between man and nature—a spectrum of coexistence to dominance of one over the other.
Roma isn’t just pretty shots and film theory. The story is fairly engrossing though viewers less riveted by the visuals may find themselves eager for a more dynamic trajectory. Cuaron’s film is a critique and a resolution to not be like everyone who takes Cleo for granted. He is determined to see her and not lose her in the midst of events and people that normally would be considered more important than her. He goes to great pains to show that everything that she does before characters’ critique her work as a silent rebuke, particularly of his parents, his siblings and himself so that the viewers will align themselves with Cleo, not them.
Cuaron also has moments when he shifts the film’s perspective and shows how Cleo is just one of many women in the vast landscape holding it down for every household in that neighborhood in an early shot on a roof where he shows Cleo washing and hanging laundry then shows how many others are doing the exact same task. He stays with Cleo the individual, but also concedes that there are many neglected individual stories that are untold in society. He acknowledges his limitations even as the all-knowing eye for purposes of this story. He isn’t God.
Roma has a broader story that is mainly occurring on the edges of the story. It affects Cleo and perhaps explains how Cleo ended up working with this family, but it is a story of an ongoing European American colonialist land and resource grab from Indigenous Americans. We see the result of it, but it is ongoing, not over. We get a hint of that tension at two times in the story: during a Christmas party and when Cleo leaves the city and goes to an area with no infrastructure. There is literally no place for Cleo, not even a room of her own. To hope to live well means the life of a servant, not the head of a household. It results in self-hatred, alienation from family and the impossibility of creating a cis het family under these conditions, forget any possibility of multiple generations in a single household. The world is literally inhospitable to an independent indigenous existence.
Then Roma is eager to show the universal burden of being a woman in a male dominated society though it shows intersectional differences depending on race and socioeconomic factors. Depending on a woman’s position in society, she may unwittingly reinforce male dominance or reject it. I’m haunted how everyone in the house acted like the food police on the little girl and called her fatty. As long as the wife benefited from the system, it was fine, but when she begins to lose her benefits, she instinctually kicks the woman lower than her and occasionally expresses a solidarity and recognition of their shared vulnerability, but it is not a solidarity that Cleo can rely on or trust. There is a scene when Cleo witnesses that vulnerability, and the wife gradually realizes that Cleo has, but there is just silence, no exchange, which is the only time that happened. I was genuinely surprised that the wife never fired Cleo. The grandmother (I assumed that she was the maternal grandmother, but a remark by the wife to the husband in an early scene made me doubt this fact-please feel free to write me and let me know if you’re certain) is completely undone by any excitement: kids behaving badly, unusual circumstances, etc. She is helpless outside of the system and usually relies on men’s favor or hiding men’s failings to survive, but during one moment of instinctual bravery, she places herself protectively in front of a woman more vulnerable than herself so socialization took root, but under different circumstances, a stronger woman could have emerged.
The most intriguing woman man dynamic for me was the professional woman, a gynecologist. On one hand, she is in male drag by virtue of her profession and frankness (I’m writing this as a woman of color who is a lawyer and hyperaware of how my profession simultaneously awards me privilege and denies me the privileges of my profession). She replicates male domination in her business like manner and to whom she directs her remarks. There is no such thing as HIPAA, and the patient feels less important depending on who is in the vicinity. On the other hand, she is in an awkward position because by the end of the movie, we know that she knows more than the family and Cleo about a person that directly affects them. When that person tries to use her as an excuse regarding why he can’t offer more than he is giving, she matter-of-factly volleyballs his remark right back at him and leaves him naked without an excuse just left to stew in his inadequacy of character. It is the closest that we get to a satisfying confrontation between men and women though it is a blink and miss it moment. It is also haunting because you find out that the wife was a biochemist who basically gave up her profession for a traditional role.
Roma is a really rich, nuanced and textured movie, but I am haunted by its limitations. Libo, the real life woman who inspired Cuaron to make Roma, is happy with this film, and I believe that Cuaron genuinely did his best to faithfully make a film that would be true to her story, but when you’re in the middle of a deep loving relationship that is also infected by power inequities imposed by the world, it is impossible for Cuaron to fully tell an indigenous woman’s story even while he may be cognizant of all the ways that he unwittingly oppressed her, and she is unaware of all the ways that a child that she loves enforces a world that does not allow her a place of her own. Many viewers leave impressed by Cleo’s grace in the face of adversity. To truly tell Cleo’s story, you have to understand that she doesn’t have a choice.