Alfonso Cuaron has given us some grand, sweeping epics in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. He gave us easily one of the best Harry Potter films with Prisoner of Azkaban, took us on a haunting journey through deep space in Gravity, and showed us one of the bleakest dystopian futures in Children of Men. For his latest film, Roma, he goes for something a little more restrained than his normal fare. The film still has plenty of features of Cuaron’s grandiose directing style, but tells a much different kind of story, that being a family drama.
Set in the 1970s, Cuaron based Roma on his own personal upbringing in the Colonia Roma neighborhood in Mexico City. We follow the story of Cleo, a live-in housekeeper for a middle class family, that include the matriarch Sofia, her husband Antonio, her mother Teresa, as well as her four young children. Cleo is one of two maids that live with the family, who treat her like she’s one of their own. The children are firmly attached to her, as she tucks them in for bed and also helps them get ready for school.
Cleo’s life is then thrown upside down when she discovers she’s pregnant. The father, her boyfriend Fermin, leaves upon hearing the news and doesn’t return her calls, leaving the family to help her during her extreme personal crisis. Meanwhile Antonio states he’s going on a business trip for a few weeks, and Sofia suspects that he’s not coming back, leading her to a journey of her own.
The film is made up of mostly unknowns and non-actors, with Sofia’s actress Marina de Tavira having the closest thing to an already-established career before this film. The use of unknown actors can be incredibly beneficial for a film, as it keeps the audience more entranced in the story and not prone to the distraction of looking for which big name is going to pop up next. And in Roma, this works very much in the film’s favor. We feel like we’re watching real people on screen. The emotion each of them convey feels so natural and the energy is completely raw. As we see scenes early on of the Cleo interacting with the children and we see the smiles on their face when she’s with them, there’s nothing that feels contrived or manipulative about any of it.
The film’s best performance easily comes from Yalitza Aparicio, who plays Cleo. Roma marks her feature debut, with no prior acting experience before this. And she totally knocks it out of the park in Roma. Everything about her performance feels completely organic. She never goes on long, drawn out speeches to convey her emotions. She doesn’t constantly break down and try to forcefully pull at our heartstrings. There are times where she says very little, and that’s when we see her at her most vulnerable. Scenes such as Cleo by herself after telling Fermin the news of their child are truly heartbreaking to watch, since we get a clear sense of how she’s feeling just by her facial expressions and body language. Not by what she says. If there’s one thing to get out of Roma, it’s that it firmly established Aparicio as one of the breakout stars of 2018.
Silence plays another key part in why Roma ends up working so well. The film is one of the rare films that totally lacks a musical score. We do hear music throughout the movie, although it’s all through songs that street performers within the movie are playing. All of the film’s biggest, most dramatic moments are all seen without any sort of music in the backdrop. And it feels like one of those things that goes almost totally unnoticed until it’s actually pointed out to you. The actors are just so engaging to watch and feel so real, that the lack of music almost makes it feel like you’re watching someone’s home movies at times.
Despite the change in pace for Cuaron, the film still contains his signature directorial style. And for the first time since Harry Potter, he does not work with his regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, instead choosing to shoot the film himself. Cuaron almost exclusively uses wide shots for most of the movie, only occasionally going into close-ups. For the most part, everything feels like one beautiful picture, with Cuaron giving us extreme detail in not just the scenes with the most dramatic weight, but even smaller scenes like Cleo and Fermin sitting in a hotel room while Fermin practices martial arts. The film feels just as epic as Cuaron’s genre work at times, though telling a much more grounded story.
Cuaron does everything he can to recreate the feel of his childhood. He’s so intent on doing so that it does bring about the movie’s one fault: The pacing. While Roma tells us a fantastic story and each scene is absolutely beautiful to look at, sometimes the movie tends to go on tangents from time to time for us to just admire the scenery, rather than focus on the story. Some shots will go on for extended periods of time, and while they’re all expertly crafted shots, there are times we find ourselves wanting to move the story forward. While film is absolutely a visual medium, one should not sacrifice the pacing of the story for an extended focus on style.
We’ll see scenes that portray some of the political turmoil going on in Mexico City at the time, including the Corpus Christi Massacre that resulted in the deaths of 120 protestors. Outside of the aforementioned scene, these scenes don’t necessarily tie into either Cleo or Sofia’s stories, and we’ll simply just get extended sequences of the chaos and mayhem occurring within Mexico City. It almost doesn’t feel right in a way to criticize these moments, as these scenes themselves aren’t necessarily bad. It’s just that it’ll sometimes feel like the story can come to a grinding halt to take these moments in and we really want to keep both Cleo and Sofia’s stories moving.
While it does have some pacing issues, Roma is overall a wonderful little movie. It’s the type of movie that has so much going on at times that it almost benefits from repeated viewings, especially due to how detailed some of Cuaron’s shots can be. The film proves that someone who works primarily in genre work can take on much meatier work, and the fact that it told such a personal story really helped its case. It gave us one of the biggest newcomers to acting with Yalitza Aparicio, and was filled with plenty of raw, natural acting that’s hard to find in any other movie. Roma is a a visual delight and certainly an important film to watch if one has a passion for filmmaking.
Comments