mothers without a voice
by
Douglas Messerli
Written
and directed by Alfonso Cuarón Roma /
2018
Based
loosely on the director’s upbringing in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City—hence
the film’s title Roma, which also hints of an attachment to “Rome,” and a relationship to the “Roma” population the “Romansh,” who throughout the world are generally described
simply as “gypsies.”
It is a strange title given the fact that
the central family upon which this film focuses are upper-middle-class
citizens, who not only live in a house with 3-4 servants, but who also have a
constantly defecating dog, Borros, as well as several birds and 4 children, this
family supported by a doctor father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), and his rather
passive, biochemist professor wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), along with her mother
Teresa (Verónica García). In fact this large family is mostly being cared for
by their house-keeper (Yalitza Aparicio), who lives in this menagerie
mostly as a kind of beloved slave. Throughout the opening credits of the film she washes-down of
the home’s entry-way, the dog’s and bird’s abode, which is followed by her desperate
attempt to gather up all the dirty laundry before the time arrives for her to pick up the children from their
various schools, re-deliver them home, help, with her servant friend Adela (Nancy Garcia) to serve-up
dinner, and then, in the very next scene, wash out their clothing on a roof-top
eyrie, from where we glimpse others like her performing the very same tasks.
Without saying anything, director Alfonso Cuarón makes it quite clear that she is on-call for nearly 24-hours
each day, rushing to the garage / entry-way each time the master returns in his
huge galaxy automobile to hold back the dog, and later in the evening, cuddling
up with her young charges as, with their inattentive families, as they watch silly early 1970s television games shows and other fare.
The director does not, at first, even
hint of the abuse she receives, since, in part, Cleo is so pliable and loving
that you can’t immediately recognize her condition. She appears more as a
trusted and caring nanny that anything else, until Cuarón very gradually helps
us to perceive her working conditions, particularly when, at one moment, her
youngest charge talks about an imaginary past life as an aged man before he was born, when he claims he was a air-pilot who died in a crash, laying down on a cement protrusion where Cleo is busy cleaning the
family laundry, pretending to be dead.
One of the wonders of Cuarón’s film is
that you never know what the next frame of the film might reveal. Suddenly, upon
her youngest charge’s insistence that he has died in a previous life, the
wonderful Cleo lays down on the same cement abutment, lying head to head to with
the boy, insisting that she too is now dead. We immediately realize, however, that
her notion of “dead” is something different from the boy’s imaginative rumination,
that she is quite literally feeling so tired that she might as well be dead; and
when she proclaims that it feels good, we comprehend that she has simply not
ever had enough rest.
The late-night arrival home of the master,
the doctor Antonio, is like a surreal intrusion into their otherwise peaceful
lives, as he slowly attempts to maneuver his large Galaxy car into the narrow
confines of the courtyard parking space, the giant beast of a machine rolling
over the dogshit left by Borros, even after Cleo has cleaned it up. We suddenly perceive that this man is a kind of monster, who
demands that everything and everyone attend to him, and it is not surprising
that in a scene soon after he pretends to escape to a business conference in
Quebec from which he never returns, leaving his wife to have to deal with his exit
by pretending to her loving children that he is simply on a longer retreat that
he (or she) had expected.
Distraught, she expresses her hurt in
various ways, at one point crying out to her elderly mother, which the eldest
of her children overhears, despite Cleo’s attempts to draw him away from his
mother’s door. Cleo, herself, is blamed for the child’s sufferings, which he is now forced to keep secret from his brothers and sisters. We are nearing the territory
of a Cocteau film.
Is it any wonder that on their nights out,
Cleo and Adela seek the delights of young men? Adela has a steady boyfriend in
Pepe (Marco Graf), but Cleo is left with his more handsome, but unreliable
cousin, Fermín
(Jorge
Antonio Guerrero), who draws her away from the movie to a rented room where he
first, completely nakedly, reveals his impressive martial arts talents before joining her
in bed.
The result is disastrous, when Cleo soon
after discovers that she has missed her period and is probably pregnant. We
truly realize her boyfriend’s treachery when, soom after, he excuses
himself to go to the bathroom and never returns, leaving her to deal with the
problems she now is facing, just like her mistress, all alone.
Fortunately, both Sofia and her mother
Teresa, despite their abuse of her, are sympathetic, taking the servant—quite disastrously,
given Sofia’s driving skills—to the hospital, where the female doctor confirms
Cleo’s pregnancy; and later, with Teresa in control, seeking out a crib into
which their working “mother” might deposit her own new progeny.
Yet here, again, Cuarón reveals that
their timing is terribly bad, for that very afternoon the tragic Corpus Christi
massacres of young protesting students occurs in the same neighborhood in which
they happen to be shopping. In those shootings nearly 120 young people were
shot down by paramilitary troops, including, in this case the young now-fascistic Fermín,
who enters with others, the very shop where Cleo is attempting to buy her crib,
to shoot down a couple of students who have attempted to escape the violence.
In the stress, Cleo’s water breaks, and
with Teresa and their driver, they attempt to escape to hospital safety, but
trapped in traffic, are too late to save he maid’s unborn daughter. The
director forces us to see the entire scene where Cleo loses the child,
demanding we recognize what it truly means to lose a child in a stillborn birth,
perhaps one of the most painful scenarios of film I have ever witnessed. It
leaves Cleo, as even her charges proclaim, nearly mute.
Yet the demands of family life are
foremost, as Madame Sofia, who has now bought a new, smaller car, insists her children,
with Cleo in attendance, drive down in one final Galaxy trip to a Veracruz beach—where she later admits to
her children, she has been forced to travel in order to let her former husband ransack their home for whatever possessions
he believes are his. The sad table-side admission of what has happened to their
father devastates the eldest son while confusing his youngest siblings. Cleo can only
look on, realizing her own losses, while hoping to help these children, whom she has basically raised, to gain some equilibrium.
Their love of swimming in the ocean is
their only relief; yet Cleo cannot swim and has never actually
been in the ocean. She watches over her charges, taking the youngest of them away
to the beach while looking back at the others, disobeying their mother’s orders, and floating out to sea impossible large waves. This brave woman has no other
choice but to enter the water herself in an attempt to retrieve them before they
drown.
Amazingly she succeeds, bringing them all
ashore just as their mother returns after checking the tires of the "beast" which
will return them to their neighborhood Roma. Recognizing the miracle that has occurred, all of
them gather on the beach like worn-out survivors—which they surely are—to
gather in the love which feel for one another, Cleo finally admitting that she did not
truly want her unborn child, with the children soon demanding that, as a family,
they can now travel, a bit like the Roma gypsies, everywhere. They are no
longer forced to remain in their topsy-turvy household.
Yet the director simply takes them home,
where, now that their father has left, has opened up other rooms, allowing them all
to re-inhabit their own space, perhaps even to discover a kind of travel from
room to room in their own household—a Disneyland beyond their dreams. Surely,
Cleo, the savior of their lives, is no longer simply a servant, even as she
climbs, in the last frame, to the roof to wash out the clothing they have worn
on their most recent voyage.
If there is little question that Cuarón’s
lovely black-and-white cinematography is a bit too coy—as Howard pointed out to
me, in one single tracking scene the director used hundreds of actors to inhabit his restaurants and shops, and at
other times everything was just too beautiful to be believed—I would argue that
it is the director’s simple attempt to recreate a semi-autobiographical world
in which he, as a child, was so immersed that determined his precise re-creation.
In a true sense, this is not simply a “memory,” but a tribute to his own “Cleo”
and to all the others who exist throughout Mexican and South American history who played the same roles. These women, mostly without children of their own, raised up entire richer families
with deep love and caring. I remember eating a dinner with the Brazilian poet Horácio
Costa whose childhood “nanny” had been brought to Sao Paulo to cook a delicious meal for us which he had loved as a
child. I’m so sorry that I never got a chance to meet her. Here, at least, we
do see the woman, however mutable (and mute) she is as a woman who raised this
family, a kind of silent beauty who belongs in such a lovely silvery saga.
Los Angeles,
December 9, 2018
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2018).