Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma’ one of the year’s best movies
Slow but luminous black-and-white film best on the big screen
The last feature film director Alfonso Cuarón made was “Gravity,” a spectacle of light and sound starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts stranded in the wide expanse of space. Five years later, he returns with that movie’s polar opposite: the exquisite “Roma,” an intimate, black-andwhite, Spanish-language visual poem starring actors unknown to an Anglophone American audience and written with the pen of memory and mood.
Based loosely on the recollections of 57-year-old Cuarón about the women who guided his young life in the upper-middleclass Mexico City neighborhood of Roma in the early ’70s, the film — which opens Friday in Houston theaters before moving to Netflix on Dec. 14 — is a portrait of two women’s very separate lives being lived under a single roof.
On the one hand, there’s Sofia (Marina de Tavira from the Netflix series “Ingobernable”), the mother of four whose marriage to a doctor (Fernando Grediaga), along with her upscale way of life, may be slipping through her fingers. On the other, there’s Cleo (a phenomenal Yalitza Aparicio, a pre-school teacher in her debut role), one of the domestic servants in the household whose life, in many other movies, would be of little interest or import.
But quiet, shy Cleo is the star here, offering a window into a hardscrabble, working-class world that keeps the likes of well-heeled Sofia afloat. But in addition to her duties around the house — the film opens appropriately with a close-up shot of a driveway being cleaned — she has her own set of pleasures and worries. She and fellow maid Adela (Nancy Garcia) like to go the movies with their boyfriends but, in Cleo’s case, it turns out that her guy, a martial-arts enthusiast named Fermin ( Jorge Antonio Guerrero), may not be worth her time and attention. Sofia and Cleo don’t have many things in common, but dishonorable men is one of them.
However, Cuarón isn’t just interested in the personal. The social unrest gripping Mexico at the time — Mexico City’s Corpus Christi massacre of 1971 resulted in police killing 25 student protesters — is not just a backdrop to Sofia and Cleo’s lives but also a grim intrusion.
Left unspoken, but plainly visible, are the racial implications. Sofia, her family and monied friends bear more European features and speak Spanish (and, occasionally, English) while Cleo and her friends are more indigenous or mestizo, and often speak Mixtec, illuminating another divide in Mexican society. There’s no cruelty between Sofia and Cleo — in fact, at one crucial point, Sofia is quite supportive — but there are clear lines that neither will cross.
Yet, for all of that, the slowmoving “Roma” is as much about atmosphere as plot. The luminous black-and-white cinematography not only informs “Roma” with the nostalgic feel of an unearthed memory but is a stylistic nod to Italian neorealism of the late ’40s/early ’50s, a street-level cinematic movement pioneered by the likes of Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini that captured the grit of post-World War II Italy. (It’s also a sweet bit of synchronicity that the name “Roma” conjures up visions of Italy.)
“Roma” is gorgeous to look at — one tracking shot that follows Cleo as she’s running through the crowded streets to catch up to the children she’s shepherding to a movie theater is one of the many visuals in the film that’s absolutely breathtaking. “Roma” was shot on 65mm and has a sterling sound mix that can best be appreciated in a big room with a big screen. To view it on some handheld device or home computer is like being handed a crumpled Xerox of the “Mona Lisa.”
Cuarón has made a roster of impressive films, from “Y Tu Mamá También” to “Children of Men” and, of course, “Gravity,” for which he was the first director from Mexico to win a bestdirector Oscar. But “Roma,” though perhaps not as immediately accessible, is his masterwork, a heartfelt evocation of a time and place that celebrates the unsung and the unheard.