Roma was the first movie in a long time to make me sob uncontrollably! It’s one of those times I’m glad I’m not a film critic. I’m just a fan of movies. Which gives me the license to gush about this movie.
Much of Roma takes place inside a large household in Mexico City. It’s inhabitants: Sofia, her rarely seen husband Antonio, her mother, four children and two maids, Cleo and Adela. The opening scene is a confusing close-up of floor tiles being washed with the opening credits superimposed on top. This very long single take establishes early on that this is a film that takes its time. We follow Cleo around as she performs her chores. Serving strawberries to the kids, putting them to sleep, making tea for Antonio, cleaning dog shit off the driveway. A lot of these scenes are single takes lasting a few minutes long, and the camera movement is slow and deliberate, surely to mimic the natural rhythm of life?
Director Alfonso Cuarón wants to bring us into Cleo’s world, a world brought to life through beautiful visuals and sound design. The film is in black and white, yet there is a striking clearness, contrast and abundance of detail in each frame. There is a painstaking amount of detail in the sound design. Every single sound rings out clearly. The sound is loud when it has to be: in the orderly chaos of a hospital, in the ocean as furious waves crash down upon the helpless children. Silent moments are few and far between. In tender moments, like the cinema scene where Cleo falls silent, the movie playing in the background fills the void left by the lovers’ conversation. There is no fancy editing or cutting in this film. The actions of the characters, fluid and spontaneous, say everything that needs to be said. We, the omniscient viewer, are merely taking a voyeuristic peek into their lives.
The city is always bustling. Life stops for no one. Cleo has her worries and anxiety about life, but she acts in a subdued manner, bottling up her emotions. It’s a major theme in the movie. Life goes on. Or as Vonnegut would say, “So it goes.”
Some spoilers ahead
The pivotal moment in the story is when Cleo contacts the father of her child after a vacation sequence whose significance I haven’t quite been able to understand. The deadbeat father, Fermin, claims that the baby isn’t his and threatens to beat her if she looks for him again. Then Sofia’s husband, Antonio, absconds with his mistress, leaving her and their four children with no financial support. And from this point onwards, the two women have no man to turn to.
And the climax creeps out of nowhere. Checking back, it’s only a ten minute sequence, but it had me breaking down by the end of it. Cleo holds her emotions back for the entire movie for them to explode in one powerful scene. I can confidently say that she’s one of the strongest female characters of all time. Her character alone makes Roma a fantastic feminist movie. But it really goes beyond that. Cleo, and Roma by extension, is a celebration of the human spirit, the ability to overcome adversity, to come out stronger after an ordeal. And what better way to make this statement than mirroring the second scene in the movie in the penultimate one. The camera swivels and shoots both scenes in the same way. In the first scene, Cleo is alone. By the end, she discovers she has so much more, delighting in her newfound place in the family.
Roma was the most powerful film of 2018. I have my fingers crossed so that director Alfonso Cuarón will make more wonderful movies.