Robbie Collin The film of the year is out today
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is the most colourful black and white film I’ve ever seen. Its images aren’t rendered in the sooty antique palette the movies often use as shorthand for the olden days, but a crisp and lucid monochrome – the black and white of a full moon in an empty sky that’s so brightly present it seems close enough to clasp.
There is a technical explanation for this: the Mexican filmmaker shot Roma on an Alexa 65, the same state-of-the-art digital camera used to capture the Canadian tundra in all its crystalline splendour for The Revenant.
But there is an artistic rationale behind it too. The world of Roma is the world of its writer-director’s childhood: its title refers to the middle-class Mexico City neighbourhood where he grew up, while its central character, a housekeeper called Cléo, is based on his childhood nanny Libo, to whom the film is dedicated. But Cuarón is no nostalgist, fussily boxing up memories like keepsakes in rose-tinted wrap. His has always been a cinema of full-body immersion – whether it involves a disintegrating space station (in Gravity), a dystopian future Britain (in Children of Men), or now Mexico of the early Seventies, with its class tensions, earthquakes and riots. In Cuarón’s hands, the past feels as present as the present.
We first meet Cléo, played with tremendous sensitivity and control by newcomer Yalitza Aparicio, as she mops the driveway of her employers’ family home, tucked behind geometric wrought-iron gates that hide it from the busy street outside. In the sustained opening shot, soapy water swishes over stone tiles, slowing your rhythms to match the film’s meditative heartbeat.
In the evening she serves the family the meal prepared by their live-in cook Adela (Nancy García) – and for a few seconds afterwards, as they watch television together, one of the children puts his arm around Cléo’s shoulders, bringing her into the unit. Then the mother, Sofía (Marina de Tavira), asks her to fetch a cup of camomile tea for her doctor husband (Fernando Grediaga), and she instantly obliges. Caught between belonging and not belonging – an indigenous woman in a well-to-do household, speaking Spanish above stairs and her native Mixtec tongue below – she just gets on with the job.
Roma’s plot takes a while to reveal itself, but involves an unplanned pregnancy and a marital betrayal that destabilise this apparently sturdy family home – the first of which is also obliquely connected to the growing unrest outside its doors. Only initially suggested in snatches of gossip, the bigger picture slowly but inexorably drifts into focus, culminating in the Corpus Christi Massacre of 1971, in which student demonstrators were corralled by riot police and then set upon by a government-trained paramilitary mob. Cuarón re-mounts this as one of a number of extraordinary grand-scale sequences here, which reaffirm him as the master of the teeming set-piece.
The film is a personal story told on a blockbuster canvas, and with levels of beauty and daring that are continually amazing to behold. Its most intimate moments are staged to feel as if they’re unfolding all around you – the camera panning over rooftops from behind dripping laundry, or standing invisibly between lovers in the bedroom, or plonking itself in the middle of the lounge with the family on one side and their TV set on the other. (Also: forget plastic glasses. The extraordinarily detailed sound design – ambient street
and nature noise in place of a musical score – is the best 3D I’ve experienced in years.) But when the film takes a step back – for the aforementioned riots, or a dreamlike forest fire on New Year’s Eve, or just a pell-mell dash through bustling city streets – it still restlessly seeks out the details that make Cléo’s story so vivid and immediate.
Take a shot of the family gloomily eating ice cream in the wake of some new setback. Across the way, to the right of frame, two anonymous newly-weds pose for smoochy photographs with their cheering guests: just background noise, but the juxtaposition gives the scene a jangly comic edge.
Meanwhile, behind them looms an enormous fibreglass crab – presumably a sign for the nearby restaurant, but also in this instant a kind of genial cheerleader for the non-negotiable absurdity of life. I mention this scene because it is one that gives nothing away. Countless others, more pivotal to the plot, are just as brilliantly composed, but which viewers should arrive at blind in the same way Cléo does, as her story intersects with history and each one leaves the other changed.
Roma itself already has the air of an all-timer. It may be the best thing Cuarón ever does. It is, without question, the film of the year.