Roma

Casual Cruelty (Till Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown)
or
"No Matter What They Tell You, We Women Are Always Alone!"

Alfonso Cuarón has come down to Earth.* Not only that, he's come home and he's revisiting the past. His latest film, Roma (nominated for a Best Picture Oscar) goes a completely different route than his space epic, Gravity, and is a far simpler story than it or his other most notable films, like A Little Princess, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, or Children of Men.

The film covers a year in the life of a live-in servant, Cleodegaria "Cleo" Gutiérrez (Yalitza Aparicio, nominated for Best Actress, with no previous acting experience), working for a middle-class family in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City, during a turbulent time (both politically and geologically) between 1970 and 1971. With her friend Adelita (Nancy García García), she cleans the house and takes care of the four children of Sofia (Marina de Tavira) and Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), a physician. Also, living with them is Sofia's mother, Teresa (Verónica García) and the family dog, Borras.

We go through a typical morning with Cleo as she scrubs the car-port (where Borras resides), gathers the laundry, then picks up the youngest, Pepe (Marco Graf) at school, prepares the children's meals and prepares for dinner for the entire family. At night, she sleeps above the residence with Adelita—aware that Sofia is keeping an eye on how much electricity they use—and begins the day again. She is a part of the family, but more subject to rebuke than any of the children and seems to be getting more criticism from the mistress of the place, as the family is going through a bit of strain—Antonio is spending more and more time away, saying that he's attending a conference in Ontario.

Cleo feels warm towards the children, especially the youngest boy Pepe, and is very deferential to the two elder women of the house, but she can't help but notice things. Still, she keeps busy and looks forward to spending her one day off, as she's been seeing a boy, Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero), a cousin of Adelita's boy-friend. He's pleasant enough, but very proud of his martial arts training—hey, this was before Star Wars, so he has to be obsessed with something.

But, it isn't long before Cleo begins to suspect that she's pregnant—she tells Fermin on one of their dates to the movie-house, but he begs off to go the "lavabo" and...just disappears, leaving her alone to consider her ride home...and her future. She is deathly afraid of telling Sofia, but her employer is entirely sympathetic and insists on taking Cleo to the hospital to be checked out (and so she can inquire about her husband, whose business in Ontario has lasted much longer than was originally predicted). It turns out Cleo is three months along, and she's told to wait in the nursery when the building is shaken by an earthquake. It's just a tembler, but it's enough to send parts of the ceiling down on the incubators in the facility.

Over the next few months, Cleo gets bigger and the family smaller by the absence of Dr. Antonio. It seems he'll be gone over the Holidays and so Sofia decides to take the family to go see relatives over Christmas and New Years, taking Cleo and Adelita with them, and the servant observes there is talk over land-rights and everyone is well-armed should things become a bit rough. She also notices that Sofia is struggling with her aloneness, as she is only too aware that her husband is not at some extended conference in Canada, something that she is keeping from the children. But, Cleo senses it. She knows what it feels like to be abandoned.

Cuarón's style here is strictly controlled (far afield from the loopiness of Prisoner of Azkaban or the POV at all costs and angles of Gravity) consisting of long takes—not unlike the intention of Gravity; the camera takes a position and remains on point, either swiveling slowly to take in the action as it occurs before it, or tracks along perpendicularly to keep the action in frame. It never rushes or jostles and there is no hint of hand-held work, the camera observes without comment or impending any added drama or or psychological intent to the scene. Even the depiction of a riot—the "Corpus Christi massacre" as it was labeled—is photographed with a camera that bides its time, dispassionately.

Roma is photographed in black-and-white, with what appears to be natural light, only a few shots make use of focus, and for the most part the film has a wide depth of field, everything in range in crisp focus and detail. No tricks, no subterfuge. Just recording the scene as it transpires, all of the action reliant on the figures caught in its boundaries.

That ambivalence in the camera extends to the soundtrack as well, certainly the finest work of the year. There is no music to "goose" the emotions or tell you what to think. Any music is source and appropriate to the period and offers no sub-textual comment, even in irony. And the sound design is complex and ever-present; it is a mixture of natural sound and layers and layers of detail, right on up to the sky and its occasional drone from a passing-by plane coming in and out of frame. The sounds are always there, providing a deeper layer to what is going on on-screen, with the sense that life goes on, all around and off in the distance, no matter what happens to the people in out focus. The world moves on indifferently, no matter the attention we pay to the characters we care about.

I love this kind of movie; it gives you plenty to think about, to observe and take things in.

And what one sees is people in turmoil. But, also impacted by what is going on around them, as the world continues to spin and life moves on. It doesn't matter if someone's heart is breaking, the pedestrians still pass by. Nor does a traffic jam care that in the midst of it, a woman is going into labor on her way to the hospital. Newborns are as protected as can be from the germs of the world, but an earthquake makes no concessions for their youth and helplessness; an earthquake quashes humans and germs alike flat. Acts of selfishness are there because those committing them simply do not care about the impact, only the personal benefit.

And that's where Roma hits me in the heart. The writer, John D. McDonald—he of the colorful Travis McGee detective stories—once saged that "the opposite of love is not hate—they're just two sides of the same coin. The opposite of love is indifference."

The world is indifferent. We put God in charge to explain it away, or, in our most kumbaya-moments, link ourselves as one body, troop, congregation or posse, when we're just individual cells commingling and colliding and breaking apart, separate and unequally equal. Laugh and the world laughs with you (if they're paying attention); cry and you cry alone. The world doesn't care. The world's too busy being the world.

That is why seeing the world through Cleo's experiences is so revealing. Her role of servant makes her an ever-present something-to-be-ignored, someone you order to clean the shit and find out, much to your surprise, she's the one you want there when it hits the fan. She is a constant Job on the job, ignored but not ignoring, the paste that holds things together, even under the onslaught of a constant casual cruelty. You care because she cares.

I strongly suspect that Roma will win the Best Picture Oscar and it should, despite some great films competing against it. It has the soul of a great movie, telling its story through image and putting you in another world, apart from your own, a magic lantern of communication. The best of what movies can be.

But, then, I also cynically think it will be because it has a couple scenes in a movie theater. The movie people like that sort of thing.