Reflecting on "Roma"

The first minutes of Roma tell us what the author - director Alfonso Cuaron has in store. We're looking down on square tiles, oriented to be diamonds across the screen. While credits fade in and out, white on the light gray stone, we hear no music, but we gradually pick out sounds of water splashing, birds, distant cars, a distant dog barking. Then water washes across the tiles, and we now see the reflection of a morning sky, a plane flying across a square of skylight. At last, we see that it's a young indigenous Mexican woman throwing soapy water on the tile, scrubbing it down.

 This movie will be told through patterns, the daily routine of a middle - class Mexican household in 1971, following in the steps of that young woman Cleo, played by Yalitza Aparicio, one of the family's two housekeepers. We will see Cleo waking the children, speaking tenderly to them, picking up their things, helping them to undress for baths, serving their breakfast. We will see her washing laundry by hand and hanging it up to dry on the rooftop; we will see her joining the family in front of the TV after dinner, before she's sent off to fetch tea for the father; we'll see her turn out all lights in the house before she goes to bed. In the morning, she will again scrub that tiled walkway.

 As the water makes a reflective surface of the pattern, we've the hint that this movie will be the director's reflection on life during his own childhood. In an interview on NPR's Latino USA(12/10/2018), Cuaron told how he was about the age of the youngest boy in the story, a charmer who tells Cleo about "when he was older" flying planes or sailing ships. The sounds we hear at the start are the sounds of Mexico City he remembers from the early 1970s. He chose to make the soundtrack for his movie from nothing but remembered sounds and diagetic music - pop songs on radio, a pretty bad military band, and a street vendor's wonderful musical whistle.

 As the water that washes across the tile leaves the pattern intact, so events wash across this family's life. Big events happen that would be the central episodes in a more common melodramatic kind of movie: fire, earthquake, adultery, the infamous Corpus Cristi massacre of student demonstrators. Here, they pass, leave their effects, and draw Cleo closer to the family she's employed to care for.

  Cuaron says that he based Cleo on the housekeeper in his own childhood. He explores what that time must've been like for her. She's close to the family, but can also be disregarded in a minute, commanded by a child to stop speaking her indigenous language, or berated viciously by the children's mother. We hear about her mother and how government policies are hurting her native village, and she tells a friend about her village. Cuaron follows Cleo on dates with a young tough who, learning she's pregnant, leaves her so fast that he forgets his jacket; Cuaron follows her to a slum outside the city where she confronts him; follows her to the hospital in labor. The emotional impact of that story is very strong. She has some allies: a kind doctor, fellow servants. When the children's father moves out to live with his a mistress, the mother commiserates, "a woman is always alone."

Leaving the theatre, I asked my friend Susan if she thought the mother's line was the "thesis" of the movie, that a woman is always alone. Susan thought, maybe, but then cited another moment in the movie that offers something more positive that defies description in words. We see a Mexican media figure, guru cum Hulk Hogan, when he challenges a field of martial arts trainees to do a yoga - like pose that requires immense inner stillness and concentration: "You won't be able to do it with your eyes closed." A hundred recruits fail, but, trying the pose from the sideline, Cleo succeeds.

 I remembered a moment when the whimsical littlest boy joins Cleo on the roof while she hangs laundry. He lies down and won't answer her questions; he says that he's dead. She lies down too, so that the tops of their heads touch. "What are you doing?" he asks. She says, "I can't tell you. I'm dead." After awhile, she adds, "I like being dead." The camera pans from them and her clothesline, to show housekeepers on rooftops hanging laundry as far as we can see.

Susan later sent a text. She had heard NPR's critic Bob Mondelo extol a scene when Cleo watches over the children on the beach, a tracking shot "that packs more drama in five minutes than most movies have in two hours." Susan writes:

Bob Mondelo talking about the long beach take made me start thinking about what we saw instead of what was said. And we saw more than what was said. At the end we see her ascend -- albeit with a big bag of laundry.

After that shot, the director flashes a dedication, possibly to the "Cleo" of his childhood.

Cuaron also pays tribute, macabre but memorable, to beloved dogs of generations past, and includes at least one dog at every location of the film where a dog could possibly be included.

The film maker also takes us to the neighborhood movie palace, which must have been an inspiration for him. We get a minute or two of a 1969 astronaut movie MAROONED. Is that a meta - cinematic cross - reference to Cuaron's own GRAVITY?