Alfonso Cuarón should make movies more often. Though his directing career began in 1983; even though his global profile grew exponentially with the release of Y Tu Mamá También, a Spanish-language film that also helped introduce world audiences to Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna; despite his steady work as a writer, producer, and cinematographer, he has made only four feature-length films since 1998. Each is excellent: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the first truly superb and perhaps strongest entry in that series; the dystopian thriller Children of Men; the Academy-Award-winning space-survival movie Gravity; and now Roma, his return to Spanish features and, perhaps, his most personal film to date.
Loosely based, allegedly, on Cuarón’s experiences as a child in early-1970s Mexico, Roma chronicles—to borrow Cheryl Strayed’s term—the ordinary miraculous in the life of Cleo, a maid in the household of a somewhat-prosperous family in Mexico City. The film begins with images of water splashing over and over across a stone-tiled floor. An open window, or perhaps a skylight, is reflected in the water, a square of brightness against the darker, dirtier stone, and through this not-quite-window, we see an airplane flying through an otherwise-empty sky. The motif of a single plane flying over Mexico repeats several times throughout the film, reminding us of a world beyond Cleo’s, of the possibility of escape, of both literal and figurative rising for those with means. As a domestic worker, though, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio, who manages to appear utterly unburnished and luminous at the same time) has no means. She lives with a second maid in a single-room apartment on the family’s property, always an exasperated shout away.
Viewers who value plot over character study may find Roma too slow, perhaps even plotless. One could view the film as a two-hour-plus slice-of-life story, wherein we learn that Cleo serves as a crutch for her sometimes-compassionate, sometimes-impatient employer, Senora Sofia. Except for one shocking scene in which a student protest is violently suppressed by government forces and an oceanfront sequence wherein a strong current endangers Cleo and two of Sofia’s children, not much “movie drama” happens. Cleo cleans up dog feces and makes tea. Cleo and fellow maid Adela go to the movies with their boyfriends. The kids wonder where their absent father is, and Sofia makes excuses for him. Groceries are bought. Beds are made.
Yet in representing the everyday reality of domestic workers and, more specifically, women, Cuarón turns the everyday drabness of Cleo’s existence into something more—a study in privilege and the complexities of professional domestic work.
In America, according to sources like The Huffington Post and Al-Jazeera, women comprise up to 95% of domestic workers, and the majority of those women are either immigrants or African-American. In 2019, those reports should surprise no one but the most clueless, white-privileged people among us. As in the old questions about who buries the undertaker or who cuts the barber’s hair, though, we might wonder who does domestic work for women of both color and means. In Roma, the answer seems to be other people of color, mostly women without means. It is difficult to watch the film without noting the class differences between Sofia’s family and Cleo. Sofia takes her children on several trips, where they and other families of their class drink and shoot guns and eat while poor women cook, clean, and watch the rambunctious children. When Cleo becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), she breaks the news during a make-out session in a movie theater. He excuses himself to buy refreshments and disappears. As Cleo sits alone and realizes he isn’t coming back, Cuarón holds the shot, forcing us to watch her nearly expressionless face and guess what she is feeling—sadness? Shock? Despair? Fear?
Luckily, in one of Sofia’s displays of compassion, she not only continues to employ the pregnant Cleo, but she also takes the young maid to a doctor and pays for the medical care. Yet, in other scenes involving Sofia’s unhappy marriage, she takes her anger and frustration out on Cleo, who has little choice but to take it. Where else would she go?
Not with Fermin. When Cleo eventually tracks him down, he denies paternity and calls her a “fucking servant,” though he lives in a hovel located in a neighborhood that makes Rio’s infamous City of God favela look upscale. He threatens to “beat the shit out of” Cleo and her “little one” if she ever accuses him of paternity again, exercising his male privilege of walking away from a pregnancy, leaving full responsibility to the woman. His disdain for her domestic work seems absurd, given that Fermin’s job, at that moment, seems to be undergoing bogus martial arts training, though his reasons for doing so later become heart-breakingly clear.
For all her class privilege, Sofia cannot escape the consequences of male privilege, either. After an early appearance in the film, her husband, a doctor, disappears, ostensibly on a research trip to Canada. In one remarkable moment outside the movie theater, though, we discover that, like Fermin, the doctor has used his male privilege to change his life, wife and children be damned. Sofia, like Cleo, is left to fend for herself.
Luckily, both Sofia and Cleo are more than capable. Though they can never truly bridge their class difference, they do form a sisterhood of sorts—two discarded women who work, nurture children, and strengthen familial bonds, not just surviving but, in their small and everyday manner, thriving.
In Roma, men wield most of the power, and women must negotiate the consequences of their whims. Educated women with money enjoy more choices than uneducated domestic workers. These power dynamics are never glossed over. Yet there is a kind of hope in the film—hope that, despite the sins of men and the upper classes, single working women of color can live lives of meaning and strength, even if their monetary situations make different meanings and different lives. The movie also reminds us that Cuarón is an artist we should treasure. Hopefully, we will not be forced to wait another five to seven years for his next feature.