Truly great artists see the world a little differently from the rest of us. They observe things a little more closely and feel things a little more deeply. Alfonso Cuarón is such an artist, and his powers of observation and empathy are on full display in his largely autobiographical film, Roma.
Presented in gorgeous black and white to evoke nostalgia and mirror the neo-realist Italian films it is clearly inspired by, Roma tells the story of an upper middle class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s—a stand-in for Cuarón’s own family. The specificity of detail here is what makes the film so special: the clanging metal stairs that lead to the roof where the laundry is washed and hung dry, the dog shit that litters the garage and has to be cleaned with giant buckets of water, the family’s oversized Ford Galaxie that makes parking in the tiny garage a daily adventure, the vendors and military band that routinely parade down the street, and, especially, the unruly, rambunctious, affectionate energy of the family’s young children—three sons and one daughter. Any other filmmaker would tell this childhood story from a first-person perspective, but here’s where Cuarón’s preternatural empathy comes in: He tells his story from the perspective of the family’s live-in nanny, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), barely out of her teens herself, who adores her charges, but whose life is disrupted when she unexpectedly becomes pregnant.
We’ve seen films like this before that were rejections of capitalism—where the class divide between the family and their help is exposed and condemned, but Roma isn’t really that kind of film. Certainly, Cuarón is aware of the fact that the family is well off and Cleo is poor, and he makes nods to the uncomfortable reality that, as close as Cleo is to the family, she is not of the family (in one scene Cleo has just settled down to watch TV when she has to pop up to make the father a cup of tea; in another, she is harshly berated for not cleaning up those ubiquitous dog droppings). But Cuarón is really emphasizing the love and familial bond they all shared. He clearly adored his nanny and one can imagine a young Alfonso watching her closely, his artist’s sensibility already intact, always wondering—and caring—what she was thinking.
Roma is also about the disintegration of the marriage between Cuarón’s parents—but only as observed, with some fear and uncertainty, through the eyes of Cleo and the children. They see that the mother (an excellent Marina de Tavira) is unusually frazzled and emotional, but they can’t quite piece it together, until she tells them the truth in a very emotional scene.
Did I say emotional? Roma, with its deeply felt nostalgia and overflowing humanity, hits you like a wrecking ball. There are a few scenes that had me this close to the kind of convulsive tears that are not acceptable in public settings. Without giving too much away, one of those scenes involved Cleo mustering up the kind of superhuman strength we tend to associate with mothers when their children are in peril. But to Cleo, these are her children—she would give her life for them. Roma is Cuarón’s love letter to his nanny, to his mother, to his siblings, and to Mexico. It’s as pure as cinema can get.
Roma opens this Friday at the Charles Theatre.