Downstairs Upstairs | Dave's Place

Roma a film by Alfonso Cuaron. With Yalitza Aparicio, Marian de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta. ****1/2

After the mind-numbing experience of seeing trailer after trailer in which some gigantic robot is saving the world from some other gigantic robot, it comes as a relief to see a movie in which the final shot—with a wide angle lens—is of a woman carrying laundry up a couple of sets of rickety stairs, then disappearing into a doorway, and the camera just stays focused on that landscape, the buildings and the sky, along with the sounds of traffic and a few birds. Roma is—at last!—a movie about everyday life, and I celebrate it, even though it’s a life that is pretty far from my own.

Alfonso Cuaron’s earlier movie, Y Tu Mama Tambien—one of my all-time favorites—is the story of a couple of teenage boys who have the incredible luck to go on a road trip with a sexy older woman who, unbeknownst to them, is facing the end of her marriage and her own mortality. It seems a small story, and every teenage boy’s fantasy. But around those events, Cuaron hints at a much larger life that is taking place (a traffic accident kills a poor man who was crossing a dangerous Mexico City city street because he didn’t have the leisure to do a safer crossing, police harass campesinos in the countryside while the boys and their woman friend speed mindlessly by) and at the end the movie makes a sudden swoop that takes it much deeper and broader, about much more than boys discovering sex.

Roma, in a similar way, shows us the story of Cuaron’s growing up—he’s one of four siblings that we see in the background, carrying on their upper middle class lives in Mexico City—but does that by focusing on a family servant, a maid and cleaning woman named Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) who is like a second mother to the children, in many ways more important than the real mother. This isn’t so much a Mexican Upstairs Downstairs because the servants live side by side with their employers, though they’re not always treated terribly well, and they perform many parental tasks, like waking up the kids in the morning and getting them to school. Cuaron’s own story is distinctly in the background; Cleo’s life is the center of the story, along with some important social events that are taking place in Mexico, including a student rebellion that was violently quashed by the police.

In some ways this method of storytelling seems especially appropriate for Mexico, where, no matter what you’re doing, so many fascinating things are going on around you that it’s dizzying. You have a destination, but getting there isn’t just half the fun, it takes half or three-quarters of the time, and is often the most memorable part of the day (my wife and I once came out of a symphony concert in Guadalajara, and almost immediately ran into a native group on the street who was from the mountains and playing a kind of music that sounded very much like bluegrass. I tried, in my broken Spanish, to explain how odd and interesting this seemed to me. Then that night we wound up at another musical event, where Mexicans in late middle age were dancing raucously to a traditional Mexican band, and we were dancing in the midst of them. We hadn’t planned any of this when we walked out of the hotel that morning). It is also an accurate view of life. We think our little story is important, but right beside it, or all around it, is a much larger story. In his two best movies, Cuaron reminds us of that.

Cleo has the usual problems that go along with her job. The family has a dog, a rather over-active animal, and she has to keep him within the confines of the house when anyone comes over, and keep after the dogshit that keeps showing up in the narrow courtyard (it’s hard to know how to describe this space) where the father parks his car, and often not only runs over dogshit, but sometimes steps in it. The car in question is a massive Ford Galaxy, which just barely, barely, fits in the space. Father is a physician, though he isn’t much in evidence around the house and hardly appears in the movie (some indication, I think, of his overall presence in Cuaron’s life). Mother is apparently a biochemist, though we only find that out incidentally toward the end of the film. We sense problems and tensions in this family from the start; the dogshit is not the real problem.

More in the foreground are Cleo’s own relationships, with a friend who works in the kitchen of this house, and with a man she is dating; we first see the women double dating, but Cleo’s boyfriend Fermin (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) is quick to get them off alone. He is one of Mexico’s poor people, left out of the country’s plans when it moved from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy (Marcela Valdes explains this background in an excellent article about Cuaron) and has since been organized into a kind of para military group. He is also one weird dude, who does an impromptu nude demonstration of martial arts for his girlfriend (she is stifling a smile, but he is utterly serious); he later shows up as part of the group that is putting down the student protests, not with martial arts but with pistols. He gets Cloe pregnant, but takes no responsibility whatsoever, and there isn’t much she can do about it.

“Why is a beautiful and intelligent woman like Cleo with such a doofus?” is a question that naturally comes to mind, but one could as easily ask why Senora Sofia (Marina de Tavira), her employer, has had four children with a man who pays no attention to her or to his family. “We are alone,” Sra Sofia tells Cleo when she hears she is pregnant. “No matter what they tell you, we women are always alone.” It is the women who get things done in Cuaron’s movies, from Luisa in Y Tu Mama Tambien to Ryan in Gravity[1] (talk about alone).

And it is the women who come through in Roma; though Cleo is not a perfect employee (she has trouble keeping up with the dogshit), Sra. Sofia completely accepts her pregnancy and deals with it, takes her to her own doctor. Even her mother, Sra Teresa (Veronica Garcia), gets in on the act, taking Cleo to buy a crib (on the day when the student rebellion has broken out) and getting her to the hospital when her water breaks. The whole crisis of the family, including Sofia’s breakup with her husband and the financial problems she faces, is distinctly in the background. But this is a woman’s movie, as was Y Tu Mama Tambien. The men we see, in both movies, are rather worthless.

Roma isn’t about an earth-shattering event. The earth-shattering events are all peripheral, as they often seem to be in Mexico (one time my wife and I were in a small town and there were police all over the place. It was almost like an invasion. Why are there so many police here? my wife asked a young dreamy-eyed woman. “Who knows?” she said. “Who knows?”) It’s a movie about domestic life in which very little happens. A plot summary would hardly compel you to run off and see it. Yet the simple way the movie focuses on Cleo puts everything in a new perspective. It’s a question of who is really important to this family. It isn’t the father, and in many ways it isn’t the mother.

The other notable thing about Roma is that it’s a Netflix original, and only appeared in theaters briefly so that it can be considered for an Academy Award. Is this the future of film in America? We all just sit at home alone and watch our increasingly massive flat screens? I have mixed feelings about that, because I still love to go to the movies. But there are a few things I wouldn’t miss. Those previews in particular.[2]

[1] Cuaron and his son supposedly composed the screenplay for this movie in one day.

[2] Also people looking at their cell phones, talking on their cell phones, texting during the movie. Waiters carting in cheeseburgers and pizzas to the patrons (a new feature of the luxury multiplex). People loudly consuming huge amounts of dreadful food. People talking to one another as if they are sitting in their living rooms, and looking outraged when you call them on it.

I also don’t like the plush seating in these new theaters. Who on earth finds such seats comfortable? Zion Williamson?