Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Starring: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Jorge Antonio Guerrero
Rated R, 135 minutes
One of the things that makes Alfonso Cuarón’s films so memorable is the director’s ability to set a scene. From the omniscient narrator speaking in non sequiturs in Cuarón’s breakout film, 2001’s “Y tu mamá también,” to the brief background glimpses of protestors throwing rocks in his dystopian masterpiece “Children of Men,” and even to the dark atmosphere of the third “Harry Potter” film (which set it apart dramatically from its predecessors), Cuarón has always devoted himself not just to crafting a scene before the camera, but also to giving viewers a sense of everything happening outside the frame. “Roma” continues this trend, but shrinks the scale of his storytelling considerably, revealing that he is equally skilled with the slice-of-life drama as he is with the fantasy and sci-fi adventures that have made his name.
Based on events from Cuarón’s own childhood, “Roma” follows a year in the life of Cleo (first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio), housekeeper and nanny to a middle-class family in the titular neighborhood of Mexico City. The year is full of moments both major and minuscule; the father of the house runs off with his lover, leaving behind his wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira, “Efectos secundarios”), and their four children; the children play with toy cars and collect hail in cups; Cleo gets pregnant from a brief fling with the martial arts devotee Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero, “Narcos: Mexico”), who promptly deserts her; she does the laundry and washes the driveway and holds the dog back from running into the street. Student protests and land disputes rage on in the far background, while planes take off from the airport and pass by overhead.
This is not a dollhouse reconstruction of Cuarón’s childhood, but a fully rendered, breathing Mexico City of the early 1970s, down to the traffic patterns, the mixing of languages (the movie is split between Spanish and Mixtec), the street vendors ceaselessly hawking their trinkets and toys, the slightly off-key trumpets in street parades. But Cuarón is careful not to draw our attention too closely to these peripheral details; they are dropped in to add local color, but they never distract from the movie’s main subject, which is Cleo and her various experiences with motherhood, the literal and figurative weight it has in her life.
More broadly, the movie is also an exploration of memory. Much like how last year’s “Lady Bird” was Greta Gerwig’s reflection on adolescence from an older and wiser perspective, “Roma” finds Cuarón revisiting his childhood and acknowledging the caretakers whose quiet heroics he was too young to appreciate at the time. In recreating these memories, “Roma” approaches an almost dream-like atmosphere, with an emphasis on how the things we remember about the most important days of our lives are often unrelated to the day’s actual events: the meal we were eating, the song that was playing, the otherwise unimportant acquaintance who happened to be present at the moment of greatest tension. And as he has done in the past, Cuarón relies heavily on long, unbroken takes, which simultaneously give these memories a leisurely pace and draw our attention to the complexity of what would otherwise seem to be simple occurrences. He can make a spectacle out of a walk to the movie theater, an event out of turning off the lights in the house. So he does, again and again. The result is both deeply affecting and universally recognizable.
“Roma” is also unusually accessible, at least for a new movie, given that it was made available for streaming on Netflix upon release. Some of that may just be coincidence (had another distribution company bought the rights, it likely would have been released in theaters as usual), but this arrangement actually works in the movie’s favor; it’s better-suited to a small screen. Sure, things look nicer when they’re bigger, but “Roma” depends on the intimacy it creates with its audience. Experienced up close and in a familiar setting, its greatest power, and its most generous gift, is to make you take in your surroundings, to see your home anew, and to recognize in their fullness the people and objects that tell the story of your life.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 1/11/19.