As a perennially over-enthusiastic person, I often make the mistake of reading way too much around a film before I see it. This rarely adds to the occasion and, all-spoilers spoiled, means even a great, paradigm-shifting scene struggles to get more than a wry smile out of me. Know-it-alls don’t win in the cinema.
However, with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, I believe it would help to know some scant facts: This is the film the Mexican director made after Gravity and it is based entirely on his memory of his family’s long-term servant, Liboria Rodríguez. Cuarón directed, produced, shot and co-edited the film, which was also lead Yalitza Aparicio’s first acting role.
If you haven’t seen the film, anything more than that is going to spoil it, so get Netflix fired up today, then read ahed.
ROMA, 2018
For this backstory post, I haven’t picked an aspect of Roma’s backstory to focus in on (there are too many great ones!), and instead, as much as possible, I am going to let the facts and trivia speak for themselves, and then add my thoughts. So instead of a lot of chat, I’ve focused on gathering facts, quotes and some key reviews.
I think Roma is a film worth seeing and letting it sink in a little for a few days. Like a wide-angle, long-take Cuarón shot (oi oiiii) there are many sides to examine here. I don’t think it’s fair to cherry-pick some facts if they support an overriding argument and then leave out others. My opinion on this film isn’t as clear cut as usual - perhaps because it is so much more recent than the other films I’ve discussed on here. Almost certainly because it was made to re-examine a past taken for granted.
Plumbing the depths of this film’s iMDb Trivia section brings up a whole load of gems from Roma’s backstory that provided a jumping off point for further reading - here are some favourites found on iMDb and elsewhere…
Roma is dedicated to "Libo”, Liboria Rodríguez, who is the family servant on which the central character of "Cleo”, Cleodegaria Gutiérrez, was based.
Colonia Roma is the neighbourhood in Mexico City where the film takes place. It is a district located in the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City just west of the city's historic centre.
Cuarón based the script on his own childhood experiences. The title is a reference both to Italian Neorealist director Federico Fellini’s own 1972 autobiographical film Roma.
This film was shot in chronological order.
According to Alfonso Cuarón, ninety percent of the scenes represented in the film are scenes taken out of his memory.
There’s a brilliant Hollywood Reporter feature about how Cuarón recreated his family home: Much of the set decoration was made up of furniture reclaimed from Cuarón's family, and [production designer Eugenio Caballero] went so far as to put in hand-made tiles exactly like the ones the director remembered from his home. "You needed to create a floor that sounds like a floor and feels like a floor and smells like a floor," says the set designer. "It helps the actors.”
Cuarón was the only person on set to know the entire script and the direction of the film. Each day, before filming, the director would hand the lines to his cast, attempting to elicit real emotion and shock from his actors. Each actor would also receive contradictory directions and explanations, which meant that there was chaos on set every day. For Cuarón, "that's exactly what life is like: it's chaotic and you can't really plan how you'll react to a given situation."
Cuarón decided to shoot on location in Mexico City instead of using a soundstage.
He also originally intended for the movie to be shot by Emmanuel Lubezki (who received a lot of praise for his work with Cuarón in Children of Men) . Because of logistic reasons Lubezki couldn't proceed after he had already done some preparations. Cuarón didn't want to hire an English-language DP and have to translate his own experience, which is why he ended up as a cinematographer.
To avoid a "subjective depiction" of the period, Cuarón chose to shoot the bulk of the film in wide shots, slowing panning over a scene, taking everything in.
First-time actress Yalitza Aparicio was literally plucked from obscurity by Cuarón. Aparicio's sister first spotted a casting call flyer and asked her sister to join her. As it turned out, her sister couldn't make it because she was pregnant so Yalitza decided to go anyway and found herself in the lead role. About to become a school teacher, she had 8 months to kill waiting for her test results, and because she had "nothing better to do" in the meantime she auditioned for Cuarón, totally unaware of who he was. The audition process stretched out over a year and, after much consideration, Alfonso chose Yalitza over 110 girls who had vied for the role.
The lengthy delivery scene in the hospital was only shot once. The doctors and nurses were real, not actors, hired to make the scene feel more authentic.
When Yalitza Aparicio met Libo, the person Cleo was based on, at first, Libo never told Aparicio anything about her life that was going to happen in the film, only things that happened to her before the film starts. So after the birth scene, Aparicio cried non-stop.
Quotes
At the awards
First foreign language film to win the Academy Award for Best Director.
Cuarón becomes the first person in Oscar history to be nominated for and to win the Academy Awards for both Best Director and Best Cinematography in the same year and for the same film. He received additional nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture for the film as well.
Aparicio is the first Indigenous American woman and the second Mexican woman to receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination, following Salma Hayek for her role in 2002's Frida.
First film to be distributed primarily by a streaming service (Netflix) to be nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. This feat challenges the Academy's years long bias against the non-theatrical distribution model of Netflix and other streaming platforms.
Reportedly Netflix spent $25 million on Roma's Oscar campaign which is more than Roma's $15 million budget.
First black-and-white film to win the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 25 years, the previous winner being Schindler's List.
After 9 nominees, this film becomes the first Mexican film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
First film to be distributed primarily by a streaming service (Netflix) to be nominated for and win in the major categories at the Golden Globes, including Best Foreign Film (win), Best Director (win) and Best Screenplay.
Along with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, hold the record for most Oscar nominations for a foreign language film (10).
Neo-realism in Roma
This film could almost be retitled Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, because in every sense, this is a story from one perspective.
Cuarón based the script on his own childhood experiences, with the title also serving as a reference to Italian Neorealist director Federico Fellini’s own 1972 autobiographical film Roma. Known as the Golden Age of cinema, Italian neorealism (or Neorealismo) was a movement in film spanning from 1932-1960 and characterised by stories set amongst the poor and working class. These movies were filmed on location, often by using non-professional actors. Performances are mostly constructed from scenes of people performing fairly mundane tasks, devoid of the self-consciousness that acting usually involves. The movement struck out against the gloss of Hollywood studio films, aiming to show ‘real Italy’ in the wake of the post-war period.
Cuarón filters Roma’s events through a character based on his own family’s maid, and calls it a tribute to the women who raised him.
If you haven’t come across the English version of the script, I really recommend having a look over it, because the detail is kind of astounding.
There is a very interesting article in Variety about why Cuarón may have chosen to use Cleo’s perspective and not a child - ie his own, as a young boy in 1970, or as he did in his Hollywood debut, A Little Princess. This feature actually includes an interview with Libo, where we get to hear more from her than the entirety of Roma, and she says some really beautiful things about the film and her experience of seeing it shared across the world.
“Cleo [is] based on my babysitter when I was young. We were a family together,” Cuaron told The Hollywood Reporter. “But when you grow with someone you love you don’t discuss their identity, so for this film I forced myself to see as this woman, a member of the lower classes, from the indigenous population…This gave me a point of view I had never had before.”
In Hiplatina, Araceli Cruz says”[Roma] is the point of view of the indigenous women that is so needed today,”:
What did you make of it? Some notes I made whilst watching it are:
This film is so beautiful you can pause it at any point and it looks like the promotional poster for the film.
I loved the still lives of wine, cigarettes and baby bottles. There are many lives lived in every space we’re shown.
Caged birds, dogs, people
Life in the corners, life out of shot
A family finding out its father has left fits into the same scenes as a newly married couple having their photo taken.
I am entirely convinced this would look utterly beautiful in colour but understand the power of black and white too.
Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian describes Aparicio as “the jewel of this outstanding film”, bringing to the role something “delicate and stoic”. Aparicio is incredible in this film - actually, she’s faultless. As a reference to the tropes of Neo-Realism acting, her silence, and what she conveys without words, is astounding. It didn’t take speech for me to cry more than once through so many scenes of Cleo’s pain.
Despite this, I still missed Cleo’s voice. She is an entity onto which plenty of things happen - she becomes pregnant, gives birth to a stillborn baby, is left to handle this by the father of her baby, Fermin, and all the while also has to continue working for the the family, constantly, relentlessly carrying their luggage (metaphorically and literally, of course), and attending to their every whim. I know that’s a modern perspective on this film - we are supposed to judge this middle class family, as Cuarón intended, but he fails here by not giving us any insight into her thoughts.
I don’t simply mean to point out the hypocrisy or countless times Cleo comes up against a trial. Or how difficult this period of her life is, from 3 September 1970 and 28 June 1971. All of that is clear from the first time the family arrive home. Instead, I want to hear from Cleo’s perspective, but she is barely given a voice. We hear from Sofía, even the children, more than Cleo.
How did Cleo feel about being pregnant? What did she weigh up in deciding to keep her baby? She jokes with the other maid, Adela, that she can’t go back to see her mother - but we’re never allowed to explore any further of Cleo’s past. I understand that perhaps this is the exact disparity Cuarón means to point out, but then why not provide a new narrative for a domestic worker on screen, right here, in the hours of film he has created to focus on Libo’s life?
We are given some moments of privacy with Cleo - but little tools to understand her interior thoughts or feelings. This is still Cuarón’s version of events. So to dedicate it to his family’s maid and to ascribe it the premise of being all about her… feels false, and means I do veer over to Richard Brody’s review in the New Yorker. I also agree with Ana Karina Zatarain writing in Hyperallergic that we do not have to understand the context of the 1971 Corpus Christi Massacre to see what impact these have on Roma’s characters - her analysis brings it home:
Cuarón avoided ‘subjective depiction’ by panning across scenes, but, like a badly run Zoom call, this runs the risk of only picking up who is speaking the loudest. In searching for films with a similar subject, I came across this in-depth article in Slate, examining the recent trend in domestic worker storylines, and how other Latin American directors have handled this subject, which looks at Brazil’s Santiago and The Second Mother and Chile’s The Maid.
In my opinion, Roma is an exquisite tribute to Cuarón’s memory of Mexico City at the start of the 1970s. Tributes also often mean you hear more about the person giving them, than the experiences of their subject. From the walls of the director’s meticulously re-instated family’s home, we are shown the minutiae of life. It’s an account as detailed as an Elena Ferrante novel. But where a Ferrante novel would succeed in giving us the story from a working class perspective, Cuarón is unable to fill in the blanks of Cleo’s perspective, or even know where his view point falls short.
Roma’s achievements are many, but bringing Liboria Rodríguez’s reality to life is not one of them.