Roma - Review
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma reveals to us the multilayering form of cinematic storytelling and all it can offer.
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, 2018.
Overlook the star ratings, avoid the hype, tune out of the awards: just watch Roma, on the big screen, and discover the potency of this kind of cinematic story telling for yourself. Alfonso Cuarón has written and directed an intensely personal work inspired by his own formative experiences which brings to life a household very close to the one in which he was raised in Mexico City.
Roma, like the Mexican district Colonia Roma, centres around a domestic worker Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), based on Libo Rodríguez who played a role akin to the family nanny in Cuarón’s upbringing and for whom the film is dedicated. Whether you know nothing or everything about such life, in examining the complex and contradictory human condition, told through Cuarón’s empathetic lens, Roma is universally relatable.
The film is first and foremost an intimate story of a familial implosion set against a chaotic setting which is as important, 1970-1 Mexico City. Cleo lives alongside the middle class family: mother, Sofia, (Marina de Tavira); father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) a doctor; grandmother, Teresa (Verónica García); four children who adore her: Pepe, Sofi, Toño and Paco and another maid and friend, Adela (Nancy García). The family breaks down following a hushed betrayal, and a stoic Cleo deals with her own personal trauma whilst maintaining her commitment to nursing the children.
Parallel between character and environment is pivotal in this story; it is neither a solely domestic or political drama, and simultaneously both, interwoven and unlocked by one another. In tandem, the personal and the political allow an acute authenticity to emerge. This is life for Cuarón, whether it is despair behind close doors, or major uproar on the street; in our lives unfortunate events do not occur autonomously, and sometimes at one fell swoop. It is as much a genius observation of the human emotions: love, guilt, anger, joy, fear; a counterpoint to the discourse around radicalisation and a tribute to the innocent women and children who have experienced loss at the hands of male aggression.
The character Cleo, for whom we invest in immensely, manifests the inherent human capacity for contradiction and our limitation over what we can control. It is brave for a filmmaker to grapple with the kind of unexpected loss that cannot be rationalised or comprehended; braver to live openly and lovingly as Cleo does having experienced such loss.
Roma is equally a lesson in acting, as it is film-making, and the two crafts give impetus to one another. It is not surprising that Cuarón is also cinematographer; only a single-minded vision can create such an extraordinary biographical account, as if drawn effortlessly from the memory. Yalitza Aparicio, and the rest of the cast, are extraordinarily natural for which Cuarón’s on-set improv method must to a degree be owed.
Roma reveals to us the multilayering form of cinematic storytelling and all it can offer. Which, incidentally, needn’t be a lot. The human story, boiled down to its purest form is enough. The ordinary can be epic. The film is an example of when less really is more; shot in black and white, action is captured by wide scapes to lend audience agency, over what feels like real-time. The constraints of cinema become freedoms; understood first and foremost as a language through which to tell stories.
