ROMA (2018)

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Throughout the history of cinema, some of the most acclaimed directors have given in to the temptation of capturing their childhood memories on celluloid. That’s the case with François Truffaut and his The 400 Blows (1959), Ingmar Bergman with Fanny and Alexander (1982) or Federico Fellini with Amarcord (1973). In 2018, the renowned Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón decided that his time had come, and he brought his childhood remembrances to the big screen.

Alfonso Cuarón was born in Mexico City in 1961. He wanted to become a director or an astronaut, and he finally entered the world of cinema. He received his first camera at 12, and started to film everything around him. His passion for the seventh art was so great that sometimes he deceived his mother, telling her that he’d go to a friend’s house- as you might imagine, this was only an excuse to escape and watch movies at his local cinema. When he finished high school, Cuarón decided to study cinema at the Cinematographic Training Center, where he was rejected because of his young age. At that time, Cuarón’s mother didn’t support his film ambitions, so he decided to study Philosophy in the mornings, and in the afternoons he went to the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC).

Cuarón studied cinema and philosophy, and he didn’t finish none of them. In those dark moments of his life, he met Emmanuel “El Chivo” Lubezki, another genius of cinema who would become a good friend of Cuarón and work on many of his films. Currently, El Chivo is one of the world’s most acclaimed cinematographers, he was the director of photography in films like Malick’s The Tree Of Life (2011) and Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015)

Another encounter was equally important for Cuarón: “Guillermo del Toro appeared later in my life. He is, like me, another worker of cinema. I was in charge of the sound’s pole, and I heard about a makeup genius in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico. Finally, we both met on a television series, called La Hora Marcada (1988). We crossed paths in a dressing room: ‘You are Del Toro’; ‘You are Cuarón’. Guillermo approached me and said: ‘You stole the story of Stephen King.’ I answered ‘Yes’, to which Del Toro added: ‘And why if King’s story was so good, your episode is so bad?’. That’s how we became friends.”

Alfonso Cuarón is now considered as one of the most important contemporary Mexican filmmakers along with Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Throughout the years, he has crafted a unique, passionate and very ambitious style of filmmaking, which is often associated with gigantic landscapes and contemporary human catastrophes. Cuarón has captivated the world with films like Y tu mamá también (2001), Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013), among others.

ROMA (2018) wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for the marvelous lead actress Yalitza Aparicio. She was born in the humble town of Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca. At the time that Cuarón contacted Yalitza for the role, she lived a quiet and private life. Aparicio was a preschool teacher, with no aspirations of becoming a professional and widely acclaimed actress.

ROMA is the name of the district in Mexico City where Cuarón grew up. This is one of the city’s places where families live in privileged conditions and hire maids and drivers to maintain their living standards. In one of those houses, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) works for a family that seems to be unable to live without her. In the morning, she wakes the children up and takes them to school, at night she takes them to bed. From dawn to dusk she works: she cleans, serves the food, cleans up the dog’s poo, takes the dirty clothes to the rooftop, etc. Cleo’s daily life is portrayed from her own points of view. Much of the film takes place inside the house which is a recreation of the home where Cuarón lived in his childhood years.

Cleo lives with the family’s cook Adela (Nancy García) in a small and narrow room of the house. They both come from the same town in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. They communicate in Spanish and Mixteco (native language), share gossip and news from the house. The four children of the family – one girl and three boys, are a charming and lovable crowd. The father, Dr. Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) is constantly absent and absorbed by his work. The mother, Sofía (Marina de Tavira) is more present in everyday life. Nevertheless, the children regard Cleo as their true maternal figure. The husband unfairly represses Sofía, and she in turn scolds Cleo. This situation becomes a chain of mistreatment that Cuarón masterfully represents through the camera’s scope.

The film doesn’t have a solid or linear argument; there aren’t grand mysteries to be solved. Instead, Cuarón creates a realistic and detailed vision of Cleo’s world. The film also works as a love letter to Mexico City’s feelings, streets, corners and socio-political situations of that particular time.

A series of catastrophes crush the stabilities of this universe. The father takes a business trip from which he never returns. A massive earthquake shakes the city. Cleo’s unexpected pregnancy triggers a series of emotional moments, betrayals and deaths. In one of the most impressive sequences, Cleo and the family’s grandmother, Mrs. Teresa (Verónica García), watch a student demonstration through the window of a furniture store. This event turns into a violent confrontation with the police. Cuarón doesn’t explicitly reveal the origins of the historical incident known as El Halconazo or the Corpus Christi Massacre (1971).

Cuarón places the characters in the midst of important historical events in Mexico: the struggle of the people for the progress of the country and their opposition against a political and authoritarian regime that tried to maintain their privileges through various strategies. It is clearly exemplified in the film via the character of Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), which is Cleo’s “boyfriend”. Fermín belongs to the military group called Los Halcones. At that time, high-ranking officials of the Mexican government secretly organized, financed, trained, and armed various groups, including Los Halcones. The main objective of the government was to stop the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Los Halcones were a group of approximately 2,000 young men, aged 18 to 29. The squad leaders were middle-class college students whom (in exchange for their participation in the group) received scholarships, weekly pays and the promise of a bright future inside the corrupt ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Armed with bamboo sticks and rifles, Los Halcones attacked the protesters and caused the second bloodiest event in modern Mexican history (known as El Halconazo), which was only surpassed by The Tlatelolco Massacre (1968).

Mexico keeps dragging the same problems of corruption, impunity, insecurity, and inequality. Those are the horsemen of the apocalypse that constantly devastate the country. These specific elements of ROMA bears parallels to the masterful Mexican movie Los Olvidados (1950), directed by Luis Buñuel.

The emblematic climax of the film is represented by a hug of the four children and Sofia with Cleo, among the rough waves of Tuxpan, Veracruz- a sequence that is both terrifying and overwhelming. More than a hug, this is the tree that represents the strength and love of the Mexican family. In any case, we shouldn’t forget that ROMA is especially dedicated to Liboria Rodríguez “Libo”, the woman who raised the director since he was a little boy. We can find many women like “Libo” in any corner of the country: a humble, noble, maternal woman who is a constant victim of machismo and socio-economic abuses. Cuarón doesn’t forget about these women and pays hommage to them in the film, and most importantly- he doesn’t make any feminist speeches or judges, but the facts speak for themselves. In Cuarón’s words:

“When you strip hope from people, it leaves a void, and that void needs to be filled. And very likely, that void is going to be filled by an ideology… Hope and faith are so connected. Now, when ideology connects with faith, the ideology becomes an item of faith, not a point of discussion.”

by Octavio Carbajal González