In his new Netflix backed film Roma, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men, Gravity) makes a triumphant return to his Spanish speaking roots in what is undoubtedly his best and most accomplished work to date. Written, directed and produced by Cuarón, Roma presents a semi-biographical account of the director’s own upper middle-class upbringing in the Colonia Roma area of Mexico City in the early 1970s, and is told through the eyes of the family’s dutiful young live-in maid.
The year is 1971 and Cleo (fantastically played by newcomer Yalitza Aparicio), a young woman from Mixteco heritage, works as a live-in maid for a well to do, yet shambolic family headed by Sofia (Marina de Tavira), her husband Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) and their four children. When Cleo becomes involved with a young man named Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) who then disappears when she informs him that she is expecting his child, the young woman soon finds an unlikely ally in the usually self-centred and stand-offish Sofia whose own marriage is slowly falling apart, and which she intends on keeping a secret from her unsuspecting children.
Cuarón does an extraordinary job in combining almost claustrophobic close-ups with wide camera angles and very long takes in order to depict traumatic personal experiences and real historical events with impressive ease. In a scene which sees a heavily pregnant Cleo caught in the middle of the infamous Corpus Christi massacre, which resulted in the killing of over 100 people by the military at a student rally, Cuarón is able to expertly navigate the personal with he public in some of the best crowd scenes ever filmed by anyone before him. In scenes reminiscent of his hugely underrated 2006 adaptation of P.D. James’s Children of Men, Cuarón uses long, elaborate takes to depict the agony of the tragic events taking place. Using Cleo almost as a witness to various historical and personal events, Cuarón creates a series of tableaux in which memory, however faint it may be, plays a pivotal role in the way the narrative is being played out.
Roma is Cuarón’s unabashed love letter to Mexico and its people, it is poetic, lyrical and simply stunning to look at. Dedicating the film to Libo, the indigenous woman who helped raise him, Cuarón has chosen to deliberately highlight the importance of these almost faceless, invisible women that many in his own class continue too take for granted.
With an incredibly immersive sound design and a cinematography which is beyond stunning, Alfonso Cuarón has made a truly inspiring, heartening and utterly devastating film which deserves to be seen on the biggest screen you can find for full effect.
ROMA will be in select cinemas from 29th November and on Netflix from 14th December.
