Where to even begin with a write-up of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma? This period epic, which screened at the Telluride Film Festival on Friday after a lauded premiere in Venice, is so full of dazzlingly intricate visual poetry, so teeming with sensory spirit, that trying to review it is a bit like trying to review all of life. Which may sound a bit grandiose, but Cuarón’s magnum opus provokes such turgid sentiment. His film is a wrenching exercise in personal and political empathy, a journey through memory and recent history that seeks to understand rather than mythologize, to ennoble rather than pity.
Cuarón, who also wrote the film, returns to the early 1970s Mexico of his youth, doing some vague autobiography, but mostly extending his inquiry into the life of his beloved nanny, a domestic worker here called Cleo. In trying to understand what her life may have been like—what private pleasures and pains may have shaped her—while his and his siblings’ rambled on relatively comfortably, Cuarón risks a sort of self-exonerating pandering. Insisting on how loved Cleo was, really she was, despite stringent social and economic inequities, could arrive at something placating and unjust.
But instead, for the most part, Cuarón addresses the fraught bond between the upper class and those they pay to order their lives with sober compassion. Cleo’s entanglement with the Gutierrez family is just that: tangled, complex, capable of kindness and, if not cruelty, certainly a casual degradation.
I think Cuarón is aware of how much his position of privilege—within the confines of his childhood home, and within a broader Mexico during a period of unrest—may forever prevent him from truly knowing the experiences of those who had a tougher lot in life. Rather than avoid the subject altogether, then, he instead goes exploring, deeply and with an earnest conviction. The trials of Cleo may verge on melodramatic, in all their tragedy and boggling kismet. But in that operatic grandeur, Cleo—who is of rural indigenous descent—is rendered fully individual and yet also an allegorical part of a much bigger narrative, one Cuarón honors with respect and humility.
As a memory piece, Roma delves into childhood with piercing specificity, as if Cuarón has borrowed a Pensieve from the Harry Potter mythos he so richly made manifest in The Prisoner of Azkaban and has spread those memories, in their silvery monochrome, across a vast canvas. Sounds and objects and textures are imbued with such power, brimming with the particular weight of formative memory, the handful of clear and distinct flashes we have of our otherwise hazy youths. The toy on the table, the faraway drone of airplanes, the salt poured on a soft-boiled egg. I don’t know how much of Roma is exact to Cuarón’s own life, but I don’t think we really need to know that. What carries through so powerfully in the film is the quotidian clamor that echoes long after it’s over, the narrowness of our granular lives that, of course, never felt all that narrow at the time.
Wise to that duality—how small and expansive any life really is—Cuarón zooms out, too. He stages one stunning set piece after another: a protest turned horribly violent; an almost surreal martial arts training exercise in a dusty impoverished community; a low-stakes foot chase through Mexico City. There’s even an earthquake. Cuarón’s film is big, loaded with so many eye-popping—and yet somehow restrained—moments of pure cinema that one is almost exhausted by its riot of sight and sound. Almost.
What Roma does is a vital cracking open. By letting the limits of his memory, and all he didn’t know about a woman so central to his life, carry him away, Cuarón has accessed, and captured, the mighty churn of the world entire. The busyness and motion of things; the planes and buses and cars and waves and fireworks and heat and flavor and dogs barking. Cuarón shows us wonders to remind us of the aching wonder of it all, how careless we are to not stop and assess everything, to not madly ask every stranger the detail of their lives, because in each may be a story we might come to bitterly regret not knowing.
Roma is not some sentimental, “we are the world” bit of preachiness, though. It’s bleak and unrelenting at times, particularly one stretch in which Cleo’s circumstances become excruciatingly dire. But Cuarón never veers into an exploitative territory, and the actress he found to play her, first-timer Yalitza Aparicio, handles these difficult scenes with a solemn grace. The rest of the cast, a mix of professional actors and newcomers, operates on the same fluid wavelength. They establish an intensely credible familial and social rapport, existing in Cuarón’s thorough environs as if they were always there. Or were there, 47 years ago.
I’m desperate to talk to you about each and every one of Roma’s astounding moments—drunken New Year’s revelers dousing a sudden fire with buckets of water, a long pan through a nighttime house going to sleep, a flickering movie theater scene that’s both lovely and heartbreaking. But I don’t want to spoil any of the film’s deep pleasures, its sublime artistry. This is a Netflix film, so here is the requisite urging that should the streaming service make the film available in an actual theater in your town—which they simply must do—go see it there. Roma demands that enveloping scope.
Cuarón has long been a favorite of mine, and so many others’. I think his 2006 masterpiece (you can have two!) Children of Men is one of the best—if not the best!—films ever made. Many of us have thrilled to Gravity, have been taken by Y Tu Mamá También’s sensual pull. But Roma is something else entirely. It’s a personal piece told on a massive scale, an exorcising of guilt by a filmmaker who sees, and achieves, true worth in what we might learn in imagining another person’s past—a people’s past, too.
In one chaotic sequence, we see a horde of expectant mothers, all in various stages of labor, trying to breathe and pace and be consoled through their pain. There is our most primal wrestling. The beautiful and brutal beginning of anything being alive. Roma, at its most transcendent, captures that tumult, in all its quiet and cacophony. Life is hard. But here is everyone.
