Roma

Late in the film, Alphonse Cuaron's Roma (2018) establishes a location by showing a Mexican residential street during a downpour.  A man and boy stand under a precarious-looking shelter and speak to another.  The subtitle says "Speaking an indigenous language".  The language is apparently not Mixteca which the subtitles translate, albeit in square brackets -- and, of course, the two Indians are not speaking Spanish.  We don't know anything about these people except that they look poor and they are huddled together against the cold-looking rain and speaking some Indian language that we are not expected to understand.  This shot is one of very few in Roma that does not show the film's protagonist, Cleo, a Mixteca girl who works with another woman from her village as a domestic servant for a upper middle-class Mexican family living in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico City called Roma.  Although the shot doesn't do anything but establish that the succeeding images will take place inside the family's home on the other side of the wall where the Indian father and young son are sheltering against the rain, the image is paradigmatic for the film -- Cuaron's movie, a serene neo-realist classic, is about the people who are outside the focus of most films and most narratives, the people without history, the poor who work as servants in people's homes or who sell food on the street or who labor in hot fields, the Mexican yeomanry, the campesinos speaking embattled Indian languages who have left the farm and their villages for an uncertain future in the big city.  Set in 1970 and 1971, Cuaron's film patiently chronicles events in Cleo's life without, except for a few shots late in film, drawing any conclusions from what we are shown, not hectoring us about poverty and social responsibility, but, rather, simply, applying formally lucid means to show us how this woman lives.  It is up to us to determine the ultimate significance of what the film's close study of Cleo's life reveals.  Although the film is not a documentary and, indeed, has the design of a lyric poem in which certain images prefigure or rhyme (or comment on) other recurring images, many of movie's sequences have the appearance of a closely observed documentary.

The film's subject is demonstrated in Roma's title sequence.  We see some nondescript tiles -- the sort of thing we walk over every day without taking any notice.  Sudsy water spills over the tiles.   Again and again, the tiles are flooded with soapy water.  After about two minutes, the camera tilts up and we see an equally nondescript Indian woman, probably in her late teens, dumping water on the tiles to clean them -- the water swirls into a drain.  The woman is cleaning the narrow driveway into the family compound, a place soiled by dog excrement from the affluent family's pet hound, Boraas.  One of Cleo's chores is to sweep up the ubiquitous dog shit and wash down the driveway floor.  The driveway is one of the film's leit motifs, both visually and thematically.  The narrow driveway gated onto the residential street where the family lives is simply too narrow for the big GM or Chevrolet cars that the parent's drive -- they are forever scraping the sides of the car against the walls of the enclosure.  (In traffic, the family's mother actually gets her car stuck between two trucks.  The scene is slapstick but the point seems to be that the cars made in the USA are simply too large for their Mexico City environs.  (The family owns a little VW beetle but, for most of the movie, its tucked-away in a corner of the courtyard at the center of the living quarters, gathering dust and rarely driven.) Cuaron shows that the pretensions of the upper middle class professional Mexicans living in Roma are too big for the city in which they reside -- the family for which Cleo works is headed by selfish medical doctor,  Antonia, and his wife, Sofia, trained as biochemist, but, possibly, teaching in her profession.  The doctor abandons his wife and family for reasons that the film never establishes and, after the first twenty minutes, is absent from the family home.  (We see him very briefly in a chaotic scene in which Cleo goes into labor and, then, delivers a still-born infant -- as with his family, he makes a commitment to visit her but seems unreliable and doesn't follow through.)  The travails of the middle class married professionals are tangential to the film's parallel plot -- the story of how Cleo gets pregnant with her vicious boyfriend, Fermin, and, then, is abandoned by him.  At the heart of the film is the theme of unreliable men, the dark side of Mexican machismo -- selfishness that results in the women being alone.  (In one key scene, the mother cries out to Cleo that it is the fate of women to be left by their men and "always alone.")  The film's plot, if the gossamer tissue of events shown can be ascribed a narrative, is Cleo's unhappy liaison with Fermin, her pregnancy and the delivery of her child during the Tlat  riots.   These events mirror the collapse of Antonio and Sofia's marriage and the effect of Antonio's absence from the home (he claims to be working in Quebec) on the couple's four children.  In default of their parents, who are occupied with their own sorrows, the children are, in effect, raised by Cleo, at least during the season of marital discontent. 

Roma reminds me a bit of the similarly serene, almost indifferent, narrative in Linklater's Boyhood, also a film about a group of people that we imagine to be "outside of history" -- that is, children.  As with Boyhood, Cuaron's film is resolutely quotidian, most of the picture involves day-to-day activities involving the family, or Cleo and her friends.  Cleo appears in just about every scene in the movie.  Indeed, her central role in the film is often to the detriment of other aspects of the narrative or the depiction of milieu.  In two scenes, Cleo and her friend, the girl from the village, run down crowded streets -- the street scenes have been lovingly reconstructed and the imagery is dense with period cars, beggars, street vendors, and fascinating storefronts with little and big crowds of people everywhere.  We would like to enjoy all this detail but find that our eye can't focus on the running girls and the street scene at the same time -- of course, we are guided to keep our attention on the two girls, thus, perceiving the fascinating anecdotally rich scenes occurring on the street around them as a confused blur.  This is one of the techniques that Cuaron uses to keep our eyes steadfastly fixed on Cleo -- even in big crowd scenes, we keep looking for her to appear and, in almost all instances, our attention is rewarded:  she appears in a door or walking down the street or amidst a crowd of people emerging from a movie theater.  Even when she is inconspicuous amidst all the exotic scenery of Mexico City in 1970 and 1971, we have the sense that, nonetheless, she is somewhere present.

Roma is shot in lustrous black and white.  The movie has no music and the events shown are depicted in sequence shots, often two or three minutes long, and usually recording events from middle-distance.  There are very few close-ups.  I identified two close-shots of Cleo in an early scene in which she sits up in bed watching her boyfriend Fermin practicing kendo in the nude -- his violence and swagger is contrasted with her passivity.  There's a poignant close-up of Cleo, numb with grief, after she has lost her baby.  But, otherwise, we don't see her in close-shots -- most of the time, the camera maintains its distance, both from her and the other characters, and I didn't really have a good sense for exactly how Cleo looks until the scene showing her grief.  This is true of the other actors as well -- we rarely see anyone in close-up; rather, we observe the actors embedded in their interactions with others usually glimpsed across a room or street, part of an ensemble or crowd.  The four children are not exploited for their "cuteness" -- similarly, the dog, Borass, as well as the other canines inhabiting the picture (there is a dog in just about every shot) is not idealized in any way:  he's a typical, defiant, and insubordinate Mexican dog.  The film's technique is not rebarbative -- it doesn't lock you out of the picture like some films of this kind (for instance, movies by Portugal's Pedro Costas):  you can see what you need to see and hear what you need to hear.  But the film's technique is fundamentally epic -- Cleo's suffering occurs in the context of a vast indifferent world:  what happens to her happens to thousands of others amidst millions who are going about their business with no concern of any kind for the plight of the film's protagonist: she is one of a multitude all striving against the obstacles and hardships that life inevitably interposes.  In this regard, Cuaron's epic sensibility casts the struggles of his characters against a background of natural hazards and calamities:  there is an earthquake that hurls debris down on newborn babies (including a tiny child in an incubator that is covered with fragments of the roof -- this is a species of foreshadowing); a wild fire blazing in a forest on New Year's Eve nearly burns down a hacienda -- the party-goers seems to regard the blaze as just another, more spectacular form of entertainment:  children play in the fire and a drunken man, dressed like a monster, sings a long, sad ballad.  Near the end of the film, the characters, including small children, blithely venture into vicious-looking waves at a bedraggled resort near Vera Cruz -- Cuaron stages a sequence in the menacing surf that is intensely frightening and a master-class in how to deploy action across a wide canvas without montage.  The film's Tolstoy-like epic qualities are best embodied in a scene that follows the forest fire:  the family with Cleo walk over furrowed fields in a huge landscape shot to show the cultivated land, wooded hills, and a huge snow-covered volcano at the head of the valley.  The camera tracks with Cleo who joyfully recalls the village in Oaxaca where she was born and observes that the air and the smell of the fields is like her home "except it was drier there."  The shot is extraordinary because of  the natural beauty that it shows, the clarity of the air, the great brooding volcano, and, most importantly, a couple of yapping black dogs that keep shepherding a small flock of sheep into tight spiraling circles in the scene's deep middle distance.  The image seems, somehow, colossal, particularly after the alarming fire sequence -- a grandiose tracking shot that cuts against the urban grain of the crowded streets, the constricted driveway and car-park, the chaotic interiors in Mexico City. 

Not only natural forces threaten the characters in Roma.  In the background, there is a discrete, but menacing subtext of political violence.  Paramilitary groups practice with clubs in the squalid Colonia on the hilltops around Mexico City.  At the dinner table, one of the kids recounts how a boy was shot to death for throwing a water balloon at the police.  Shady-looking military bands periodically march like zombies down the streets.  These images presage a bloody riot that occurs when Cleo, heavily pregnant, goes to a furniture store to buy a baby crib.  Outside, rioters surge forward to attack police and people are shot down in the street.  Cuaron stages this scene with hundreds of extras as something only imperfectly glimpsed by Cleo -- there is no god's eye or privileged view of the bloody chaos.  We see what Cleo sees -- rioters running up the center of the street, people firing guns from behind cars, a girl holding up her boyfriend's head as he bleeds to death on the pavement.  A death squad pursues a demonstrator and his girlfriend into the furniture store and guns him down as the store clerks scream.  (Here, the film relies upon an unlikely coincidence:  Cleo's water breaks during the shooting, perhaps, because of the shock and Fermin appears, carrying his kendo stave in the furniture store, apparently part of the paramilitary death squads roaming the streets.)   Cleo can't get to the hospital in time and the baby dies.  A long grim scene shows medical personnel stitching up a tear in Cleo's vagina while other nurses wrap the dead baby like a Christmas present, swaddling it in white cloth, in the background of the image.  Cleo's distance and isolation from the dead baby is palpable and seems to verify Sofia's claim that Mexican women must bear their suffering alone and without help or support from others. 

In the film's last ten minutes, Cuaron discretely implies an identity between Cleo and Mexico.  Although she doesn't swim, Cleo has fearlessly charged out into the turbulent sea to save two of Sofia's children caught in the undertow.  (The family has gone to a shabby seaside resort so that Antonio can retrieve his book cases from the home -- an event that explains a number of long, tracking shots early in the film in which the books and book cases are prominently shown.)  The movie opens up into a huge landscape -- only the second big landscape seen from a high perspective in the film.  We see the family in their small car driving across a desert that seems archetypally "Mexican" -- cactus, rock outcroppings, and some distant mountains.  The film cuts to the interior of the car where the children are excitedly discussing how Cleo saved them from drowning.  After some dialogue in the moving car, the film cuts to an exterior shot in which we see Cleo's face behind the window, a panorama of the Mexican landscape superimposed upon her features.  This image seems to suggest that Cleo is representative -- that she embodies certain aspects of the Mexican national character.  I am ambivalent about representations of this sort -- I doubt that there is any "authentic" way to be Mexican just as there is no essential or fundamentally "authentic" way to be an American.  Nonetheless, for a moment, Cuaron implies an identity between Cleo and the Mexican land.  The ending is more subtle:  the servants do laundry on the roof of the house.  We see Cleo carrying a large basket of laundry up a steep, daunting iron stair, really more of a fire escape than steps for daily use -- we see  her ascending upward toward the blue sky over Mexico City where a jet is slowly sailing across the heavens.  She vanishes onto the rooftop and the film's title Roma is superimposed over the image together with a dedication, apparently to woman similar to Cleo who was important in Cuaron's life. 

When I told my son, who attended the film with me, that Cuaron seemed to be equating Cleo with the Mexican people, he replied that this would mean that these people were ignorant, uneducated, docile, readily manipulated to their own disadvantage, and politically naïve.  My response was that this was true but that Cuaron also had shown that these people are indefatigable, gentle, loving, selfless and courageous. 

Roma has been shown in some select theaters to qualify for the Academy Award.  The film will be on Netflix in late December or early January 2019.  It's an achievement of high order and deserves your attention.  (I'm unsure how the movie will look on TV -- many of the wide-screen images require the audience to scan the picture and pick out different zones of activity and secondary areas of emphasis  -- for instance, the women walking along the hillside above the swirl of dogs and sheep that the dogs are either herding or harassing.  I presume that audiences will be able to do this on smaller screens although some of the shots undoubtedly may prove puzzling.)