By Rafael Azul
17 December 2018
Written and directed by
Alfonso Cuarón
Roma is written and
directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, 2001, Children
of Men, 2006, and Gravity, 2013). Shot entirely in Mexico City, in black
and white, the work is a journey back in time and memory to Cuarón’s childhood
in the city’s Roma neighborhood (he was born in 1961) and dedicated to Cuarón’s
own childhood nanny. The central character is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a
domestic servant in an upper middle-class household.
The film takes place between
mid-winter 1970 and mid-summer 1971, a period of about 18 months, bracketing
the unmarried Cleo’s unwanted pregnancy.
Roma is a sensitive portrait
of a family breaking apart within the broader context of a social crisis. It
follows Cleo, a Mixtec Indian, as she performs her daily chores, which include
caring for the family’s four children.
The film is truly an important
work of art. Cuarón has managed in the form of a filmed essay—a poem about a difficult
period in a family’s life and in Cleo’s—to provide viewers a portrait of human
strength and dignity. He has done so without sentimentality, excessive
romanticism or hero worship. What is especially unusual in our day, the
writer-director (who also photographed and co-produced the work) chooses to
concentrate on the more painful and moving fate of the working class figure,
Cleo, and not on the problems of the various family members, whose own
conditions, of course, are worth examining.
In an early scene, Cleo washes
the family’s clothing on the roof while two of the children play around her. As
the camera pans, one sees other women, on other roofs—each working in the same
matter of fact manner. At the same time, one senses something unique about Cleo
in this scene: she pauses in her work to participate in the fantasy life of the
youngest child, an emotional give-and-take echoed in a dramatic episode toward
the end of the film.
In another of Roma’s memorable
sequences, Cleo takes a city bus to the outskirts of the city. The scene in the
shanty-town, composed of cardboard and tin shacks built around a muddy field,
provides a picture of the life of peasant migrants who have been expelled from
the countryside by the suspension and reversal of Mexico’s pre-war land reform
and the resulting rural misery.
The wretched surroundings in
this marginalized township contrast with the vibrancy and creativity of its
inhabitants.
As Cleo walks to her
destination, the township is being bombarded with political propaganda from an
open-air loudspeaker, cynically praising the benefits that President Luis
Echeverría is bestowing on the community. Interior Minister under the previous
president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría directed the infamous 1968 Tlatelolco
student massacre in which 300 to 400 students were murdered.
An unknown number of students,
workers and peasants died in the so-called Dirty War conducted by the Mexican
authorities in the 1960s and 1970s against political opposition.
In addition to those killed in
the numerous massacres, 1,200 people “disappeared,” according to conservative
estimates. Mexican human rights groups have collected evidence of some 650
cases of civilians who disappeared in the state of Guerrero in south-western
Mexico alone, more than 400 of them from the village of Atoyac de Alvarez. The
survivors of detention tell horrible stories of torture and suffering.
Other images in Roma, the
shadows of men in paramilitary training, children in a field, the arid Mexican
landscape and the militaristic parade of a high school marching band passing
through Roma, are nodal moments in the story and effectively direct viewers’
attentions to the underlying drama and tensions.
In regard to the history Roma treats,
by 1970, Mexico had reached the end of its boom and was entering a long period
of economic and social decomposition, from which it has yet to recover.
The phenomenon of the
urbanization and proletarianization of peasants, from the villages and fields
to the slums, throughout the postwar era, took place across Latin America and
led to the formation of a series of megacities, Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos
Aires, Rio de Janeiro and others, creating, among other things, the army of
exploited domestic servants, service workers, street vendors and street
entertainers like those depicted in the film.
Between 1950 and 1960 there
was an explosive growth in Mexico of landholdings of over 1000 hectares (2500
acres), and an equally volatile growth of very small farms of less than 5
hectares (12 acres)—fifty percent of peasants were left landless. In the film,
Adela (Nancy Garcia), a fellow servant, whispers to Cleo that the government
“took your mother’s land.”
These changes did not take
place without mass peasant resistance.
Of course, individual
responses to social processes will differ widely. But if the character is
intended to represent wider layers, to be “typical,” it may be somewhat
misleading that Cuarón depicts Cleo as merely submissive and hard-working, the
first to get up in the morning, the last to go to sleep at night. She is
someone who knows her place in the home and does not need to be told twice
about things.
Thankful that her boss, Sofia
(Marina de Tavira), does not sack her for being pregnant, Cleo continues to do
all the work expected of her: climbing the many steps to the roof to wash
laundry by hand, mopping the floors, serving meals, etc. Her tasks also include
waking the family’s children, with whom she bonds, and getting them ready for
school. She is particularly fond of the youngest.
There is a suggestion, as the
film evolves, of a special link between the women of the household—Sofia,
struggling with a loveless marriage, her widowed mother and the two female
servants. A drunken, unhappy Sofia tells Cleo at one point that “we women are
always alone.” In any case, the lines of authority are clearly established.
Cleo never complains, never has to be told to do something twice, and never
talks back, even when yelled at unjustly.
The strongest emotional
connection Cleo has to the household is through the children. As it turns out,
her extreme devotion to them eventually forces her to go way beyond the call of
duty.
Another element in the film is
the baleful influence of the United States. Cuarón offers a cultural critique,
depicting Yankees or those Mexicans who imitate them as gun-happy landowners,
whiskey drinkers, philanderers and butchers of animals. In one scene, the
physical training of a murderous paramilitary squad, collectively known as “Los
Halcones” (The Hawks), is shown being overseen by a US (i.e., CIA) official.
Corpus Christi Day massacre
On June 10, 1971, Corpus
Christi Day in the Catholic calendar, hundreds of university students protested
in Mexico City, demanding political freedoms and democratic rights for workers
and peasants, an end to repression of labor struggles and an educational system
oriented toward the elevation of the cultural level of workers and peasants.
The demonstrators were
corralled by the military, while the halcones brutally assaulted
them. About 120 students were murdered. Wounded students who attempted to hide
were attacked and killed, even in hospital emergency rooms. The Corpus Christi
Day massacre is also known as El Halconazo (The Hawk Strike). To this
day, no one in the Mexican establishment has been prosecuted for this
horrendous crime.
To his great credit, Cuarón
dramatizes that horrific event. Cleo and Sofia’s mother, out shopping for a
crib, witness the Corpus Christi bloodshed first hand and are deeply
frightened.
In a powerful and moving
moment, a student, cradling her dying comrade and crying out for help, demands
to know why this is happening. Cleo has a personal connection to one of the
brutal killers. She goes into labor.
The student’s question demands
an answer.
To assess the impact of Roma on
young people, the Mexican webpage “ Reporte Índigo ” spoke to high
school students who had just seen the film.
Referring specifically to the
scene of the halconazo, 18-year-old Abigail Ardavín declared: “Normally
our generation finds it difficult to imagine what happened in the past; it’s
like we cannot weave things together. When one sees how life was then, one can
begin to assess what has happened to our society.”
“There are parts that make you
tremble. I think I liked the story. I am still processing the history. Roma is
great, great history,” added Jair Nieto.
The significance of directing
the attention of young people in particular to important historical events, as
Cuarón has done, can hardly be overestimated.
Though the two films are very
different—products of distinct times and circumstances—Cuarón’s approach and
the film’s name brought to this reviewer’s mind another Roma, Italian
director Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta,
1945). Inseparable from the historical events that surround both films is the
not so small change of human relationships. The use of non-professional actors
gives both films a semi-documentary character.
Finally, it must not be lost
on the viewer that Roma, spelled backwards is Amor, the Spanish word for
love. The real heroine of this film, Libo, was Cuaron’s live-in nanny, to whose
memory the film is dedicated.
Roma has been highly
praised and forecast to win an Academy Award in 2019. It is polished in its
photography and sound and the skill of its performers. Cuarón is a justly
celebrated director. It is worth noting that the filmmaker once explained that
“My biggest source of inspiration was my uncle Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, a
world-known criminologist. He found [Leon] Trotsky’s assassin, introduced me to
people like Gabriel García Márquez and constantly advised me to work with
topics that were personal, framing them in a sociopolitical context.”
However, the impact of the
often tragic events in Mexico and throughout Latin America in the 1960s and
1970s, when Cuarón was growing up, no doubt weigh on the director. Roma is
picturesque, but its long takes in which events unfold before the often unmoving
camera suggest a certain passive and fatalistic view of things. It would seem
reasonable to suggest that this view is bound up with the representation of
Cleo’s unquestioning loyalty and that of all the servants depicted in the movie
(no other section of the working class appears).
In that sense, the overall
vision that Cuarón presents is at odds with the spirit of rebellion and
resistance of Mexican workers and peasants throughout history, in the 1970s and
today. The 1950s and 1960s in Mexico were years of intense class struggle,
involving miners, railroad workers, teachers and other key layers of the
working class. These struggles, which only intensified in the 1970s, surely
would have had a profound impact on those who lived through them.
Unfortunately, Roma leaves
out that part of the story.
Roma’s theatrical release
was limited to a few theaters in the US. It became available on December 14 on
Netflix.
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