Roma

Or: Comes in Waves

It’s not every time I sit down in the theater where I’m hooked in a movie from the first minute. But the opening credits, where our heroine Cleo Gutiérrez (Yalitza Aparicio), the live-in maid of a wealthy family in Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, washes the stately, enclosed driveway, scraping all the dog leavings that will continue to accumulate every day throughout the nine months the film chronicles. The close up of the tiles being washed by waves of water slowly being to reflect the architecture of the home that surrounds it, setting our pulse for the patient pace and unfurling delights of the film to follow.

The year is 1970. Unrest is in the streets and behind the frosted glass of Cleo’s employers home. Director and writer Alfonso Cuarón has cleaved to a place and time close to his own childhood (shooting on the very street where he grew up), but has chosen instead to focus on the life of a Mixtec servant, apart and a part of the family. Cleo is respected by her employers and loves the children under her charms, but, in the way of the laboring class, keeps silent as she washes up the tears and laundry and leavings of the family. What takes the sympathetic slice of life of a particularly bad year in Cleo’s life, and makes it such an electric film, is Cuarón’s gift for stillness and surprise. Almost every scene (many of them languid one-shots that glide like melting butter around the room) container some small surprise, or a moment of visual magic, foreground or backgrounded, ranging from the peculiar (the sudden nearness of a shower curtain flung by a naked man) to the tragic (the quiet business of an operation gone wrong) to the breathtaking (a messianic spectacle at a martial arts exhibition.)

There's no bump and go here, no rush to get through the next scene; the image, the story, are merely waiting for you if you hold still enough. Being in the film is rather like being in Cleo’s company. Aparicio has the carefully neutral expression of staff, betraying neither surprise at life fireworks nor pain at its scattered scat. But in private moments, or when she thinks she is unobserved her posture blossoms or crystallizes in delight or pain. Her voice is also stunningly laden with feeling and nuance. Aparicio is nicely counterbalanced by Marina de Tavira (the wronged lady of the house, Sofía) who’s turn-on-a-dime nature swoops and zigzags about the film, terrifying and deeply sympathetic as she bears her burdens, particularly when rallying her family (biological or otherwise) together.

I stayed with Roma as its waters grew troubled, from the suds of its opening to the rolling, dangerous waves of its close. The frequent collections of water Cuarón singles out with his camera (the ripples in a darkened sink, puddles in the shards of an ill-omened vessel) are like his heroine and his film: apparently commonplace but with its own power and majesty.