Roma (2018)

Alfonso Cuarón’s last two English-language films, Children of Men (2005) and Gravity (2013), reveal him to be an extraordinarily gifted orchestrator of shots and sequences — but always at the expense of the people located within the world of the story. This tendency is still in evidence in his latest, much garlanded film ROMA, the story of a house-maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), who lives with and works for a middle class family in Mexico city.

The film, set in 1970-71, starts by establishing the rhythms of Cleo’s working life: she cleans the car port (which is just too small for their car to fit, and is always filled with dogshit — never let it be said that the symbols are subtle), serves meals, cleans dishes, does the laundry, and puts the children to bed. The mounting sense of there being yet another task for her to perform is palpable. And while there are occasions when her employer, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), lets out her frustrations at Cleo, the director does take the time to lay-out how this arrangement is affectionate. The children (with the exception of the eldest) all seem to adore Cleo, and she them.

The story, such as it is, begins to move when both Cleo and Sofia find themselves betrayed and abandoned by the men in their lives: a newly pregnant Cleo informs the father-to-be, only for him to scarper; Sofia’s husband, who from the start seemed too taciturn and distant, runs off with a new girlfriend, unbeknownst to the children.

Filmed in black and white on an Arri Alexa 65 camera, even those unsympathetic to ROMA have to admit to finding it, in no small measures, a beautiful film. The master shots are commanding and full of activity, and the sound design emphasises the panorama of experience the characters are living through. The panoramic aspect is felt most keenly in the scenes in which tracking-shots are utilised, as Cleo and her friend and colleague Adela walk down the sidewalks, or she chases after the children on the way to a cinema. It seems as though the camera could pan another ninety-degrees, or track another twenty-metres, and the film’s world would not disappear.

And yet this technically marvellous evocation of a place in the past feels completely removed from lived-in circumstance. Cleo is endowed with nothing like enough life of her own, which is telling of who the film is personal to. Later, Cleo’s story interacts with the Corpus Christi Massacre of 1971, entailing a galling coincidence, which ends in a sequence I will not describe, except to say that it enacts upon Cleo a Michael Haneke-like cruelty that I find difficult to square with any notion that film supports or has any feeling toward her at all. Even worse is the climactic sequence, about which I’ll be circumspect: its note seems to be, and maybe it’s the film’s note too, ‘thank you for your suffering’: which is a note of contempt.