The first plane in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma sails across a snatch of sky mirrored in soapy water; the next, in the sun-flared background of a paramilitary training session, girt by dust and low mountains. The final plane appears as the camera pans skyward just before the credits roll, closing the film with the promise of an opening. It’s Mexico City in 1971 and the aeroplane signals a longed-for cosmopolitanism, traceable in Cuarón’s work from the summertime roving of Y Tu Mamá También (2001) to the border-shattering crises in Children of Men (2006), then leaping wide to the extra-terrestrial in Gravity (2013). As a child, Cuarón wanted to become a pilot or an astronaut, but gave in to the protean turns of filmmaking, which crosses borders of a different kind – most recently, into the memory of his beloved childhood caretaker, Libo Rodríguez, cast into celluloid life as Roma’s protagonist, Cleo.
So comes the question that follows all stories plucked from other lives – what happens when you tell an autobiography through the eyes of someone who is, patently, not you? And, in this case, what if that someone was paid to raise you, feed you, and clean your house? Everyone has an answer: Cuarón’s whiteness begets a colonial gaze; Cleo lacks the discursive inner life of a fleshed-out character; Mexican critics love it; Mexican critics do not love it; Indigenous representation is an accomplishment; rich men should not make movies about their former maids. It seems a feat of roleplaying as laboured as Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and just as reliant on firsthand accounts which, we are assured, Cuarón has thoroughly plumbed – he interviewed Rodríguez about her memories, down to the detail of her clothes, and brought her onto the set for consultation. So much of the writing about Roma (including this piece) is informed by reactions to other pieces, inevitable for a film that unwittingly spotlights the quandaries of representation. Of the film’s detractors, Pablo Calvi at The Believer, offers one of the trickier and more interesting arguments: Cleo’s recalibrated perspective – mined from Rodríguez, annexed to Cuarón’s own gaze, then animated by Yalitza Aparicio as the fictional Cleo – ultimately allows Cuarón to control the “axis of information distribution”. And what does he distribute? Tragically wrought affects that level a Mixtec woman’s feelings of dispossession and betrayal with her white employer’s failed marriage, writes Calvi.
This issue of suspect levelling is echoed in the many criticisms that Roma flaunts history as window dressing, circling Cleo without elaboration: in their native village, the state has seized her mother’s land; the white family’s wealthy relatives are in questionable possession of hunting grounds and a manor so sprawling that even the long takes filmed in it fall short of its magnitude; an excursion to buy a baby crib dissolves into the terror of paramilitary violence, culminating in the Corpus Christi Massacre. Cleo’s lack of a carefully hewn political animus is seen as disappointing; characterisation is inadequate without explicit ideology or inquiry into the world at large. Meanwhile, others argue that her voluntary (and involuntary) domesticity is a trap of passivity, falling into the hagiographic archetypes that inform so many representations of female domestic workers as silent emotional marathoners. There is a moment when a group of young paramilitaries are training on an open field, all figures of rehearsed grace in a dozen uniform rows until their instructor suggests a balancing exercise: with closed eyes, they must balance on one leg and raise their arms in a diamond-like salutation. The men are all stumbling limbs and dust-rousing failures but then, the camera arrives at Cleo, posture perfect in one quiet attempt. Her calm is compensatory; innate.
What’s interesting is the familiarity of Cuarón’s structure – Y Tu Mamá También elides substantive political engagement in a similar way. An intermittent voiceover discloses, matter-of-factly, the death of a migrant worker struck by a bus, the location of a rural village left by a wealthy character’s nanny, the industrial changes that ruin the futures of a fisherman’s family. The young protagonists Julio and Tenoch careen along dirt roads with seventeen-year-old abandon, vaguely aware of systemic corruption but too hypnotised by summer hormones and the low-stakes jostling of chummy bravado to look any further. Maybe Cleo’s absent politics jar in a time when the general frenzy of a trash fire world means no one can afford to be apolitical, or maybe we give a free pass to teenage boys who are too visibly cunt-struck to think beyond themselves, but the hard fact remains that many people live outside the aphoristic remit of the personal as political. For all the doomsday clamour and demands that art attend social problems with an urgency that matches their arrival, fictional characters have no obligation to be avatars of praxis.
In lieu of a road trip distraction, Cleo has the diverting rhythms of the house she minds but does not own. She sweeps, scrubs, rinses, loves, her labour mostly rote but often emotional. When she rides a bus to the outskirts hoping to talk to Fermín, the father of her then-unborn child, he rebukes her, calling her a pinche gata, a Mexican slur for domestic workers. Even Cleo’s mother harbours an unexplained grudge back home – for her daughter’s choice of employment or her city-bound abandonment? As with most of his other films, Cuarón produced, wrote, directed, and edited Roma, but parted from stalwart collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography. In his absence, the film is stitched together with glacial long takes that don’t wink so much as nod self-appraisingly to the neorealist tradition of magnifying the banal. However easy it is to dismiss a static or slow camera as performing attentiveness, it works – I have never looked so hard at soapsuds, or dog shit swept off tiles, or burnt grass, ghostly in the aftermath of a forest fire. Early on, there is a shot that begins with Cleo washing clothes on a laundry set-up on the roof, while two of the children dart around her with toy guns. The younger boy drops out of the game and the camera follows him as he lies down on a cement block under the sun, arms splayed in unconvincing imitation of a corpse. Cleo enters the frame, hands dripping, and lays head to head with the kid to match his ploy. “Hey,” she says, “I like being dead”. The camera drifts up to the hung laundry, translucent with light, and pans across a vista of other clotheslines to the sounds of hands lathering and wringing. Other roofs, other maids.
Cuarón has spoken of the guilt that likely steered the film’s focus towards Cleo and away from a more explicitly self-centred exercise in recreation. What might feel a little grating, I think, is the attempt to assuage post-hoc guilt through an auteurist reach that, by nature of its content, indulges self-reflexivity. Even Cuarón’s decision to avoid shooting on black and white film side-steps nostalgic effect in favour of “a modern film that looks into the past”.1 So the vantage point from here is all his: there is the longed-for mobility of the airplane motif, the regular cinema-going, and even a shot of grainy astronauts from John Sturges’ Marooned on a theatre screen. Cuarón’s nods to himself seem peripheral but bring up an earlier concern: how can an auteurist approach (and an auteurist read) accommodate a Cuarón-Rodríguez hybrid perspective? As a critical framework, the construction and reception of an auteur’s – an author’s – totalising vision apes the autonomy of literary authorship, but omits the complications wrought by the visual politics of onscreen bodies. What, if anything, does the labouring Mixtec woman author by sheer fact of her visibility? As critic Guy Lodge observes in Variety, “Roma gives a disenfranchised woman a spotlight more than it does a voice”. Like this year’s other memorable non-actor debut – the taciturn Adriano Tardiolo in Happy As Lazzaro – Aparacio’s guileless presence is offered as something complete, a presence that “speaks for itself”. But nothing so intentional as a protagonist in a meticulously executed film can really speak for itself, though we might ask what, in the muted greys of her weary face, we actually want her to say.
1 Roma was shot in colour and digitally rendered in black and white.
Phoebe Chen is a graduate student at Columbia University. In another life, she studied law and wrote fiction.
