Cuarón returns to his roots in this sweeping but intimate masterpiece
Roma
Cert TBC, 135 min
★★★★★ Dir Alfonso Cuarón
Starring Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Verónica García, Victor Manuel Resendiz Ruis
‘Women, we’re on our own!” Señora Sofia tells her live-in maid Cleo in a flash of drunken lucidity one night, in this extraordinary new film from Alfonso Cuarón. Cleo smiles and shepherds her upstairs. She is well aware of that.
Five years after Gravity, the Mexican director has returned with what he has described as his most personal project to date: a period piece shot in buttercream monochrome, both sweeping and heart-quickeningly intimate, and set in and around the Mexico City of his childhood. It ends with the simple dedication “For Libo”, Cuarón’s grandmother, and tells the stories of those two aforementioned women, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) and Sofia (Marina de Tavira) – one rich and pale-skinned, the other poor with indigenous roots. Both find themselves almost constantly surrounded: most often by Sofia’s four children and her mother Teresa (Verónica García), who lives with the family, but also sometimes by great gatherings of friends or strangers, in astonishing long-form, grand-scale scenes that reaffirm Cuarón as the master of the teeming set-piece. Yet it is the trials each woman face alone, some of which fall as hard as hammer-blows, that end up shaping the course of their lives.
For Cleo, on whom Roma mostly focuses, the tension between belonging and not belonging has come to define her. Born in a southern village, she moved to the city and found work with Sofia and her doctor husband. Now she’s almost part of the family but not quite, and broken-spell moments like a blunt request for a cup of tea subtly but continually reaffirm her fringe status.
The film is so sensually attuned to the routines of daily life that the larger plot, involving an unplanned pregnancy and a romantic betrayal, all but steals in unannounced. It is not a nostalgia piece, exactly: for one thing, Cuarón does not sentimentalise his characters, and his cast, led by the brilliant newcomer Aparicio, play them as living people rather than the fondly recalled types of Fellini’s Amarcord.
But every individual scene feels filled with the lucid detail of a formative recollection or a recurring dream: a gun clutched menacingly in the foreground of an execution during the city’s Corpus Christi riots of 1971, a man singing during a forest fire, while crowds rush to extinguish it and sparks swarm up into the night. Roma is made of the stuff of memory, and is the kind of film you don’t forget. RC
Roma premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival last night and will be released on Netflix later this year.