The Hidden Politics of Roma
Despite losing out on the Best Picture Academy Award, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma picked up three Oscars: Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Foreign Language film. For a moment, it came very close to becoming the first non-English film to win the Best Picture category in Academy Awards’ history.

The film’s success is well-deserved. Every moment of the film — from the four-minute opening sequence where the hero of the story mops the floor of dogs poop, to the utterly captivating moment she wades into the churning surf of the ocean — is part of an intricate jewel-like structure of symbolic connections. Critics are united on the point that Roma is at the very least a masterpiece of cinematography, a movie of set pieces perfectly set in place.

Cuarón wrote, produced, directed and shot a very personal film based on his own childhood in Colonia Roma, Mexico City. The love invested in the project shines through the pristine, shimmering screen as it pans and glides through the lives of the two women that raised him.

The domestic drama of Roma principally follows Cleodegaria “Cleo” Gutiérrez (played by the untrained Yalitza Aparicio), a maid of indigenous Mixtec origin working for a wealthy family. Sofía (Marina de Tavira), her employer and the matriarch of the family, is the secondary focus of the film as she tries to hold the family together and make ends meet.

While most agree that Roma is undoubtedly beautiful and life-affirming, the film has come into criticism from some quarters. Some — like Richard Morgan in the Washington Post — contend that the depiction of Cleo is sanitised to the point that her agency is taken away.

The down-trodden maid, who tells the children she loves them when she puts them to bed but cannot sit with them on the sofa, takes every insult thrown her way with a quiet dignity when she has all the right to be angry.

Is Cleo — modelled on Cuarón’s childhood maid — really a saint or has she been robbed of her voice as a working-class Mixtec by a male director’s nostalgic reverie?

This is an understandable criticism but you only have to watch what is happening in the background to understand that Roma is more than a domestic drama or a parable of saintliness.

Some critics have written that Roma is set against “the backdrop” of civil unrest in Mexico, but the interplay between foreground and background means they are far from mutually exclusive. The background is the very engine of Roma’s potent politics.

Anti-Allegory

Alfonso Cuarón’s signature style is to run two parallel narratives at the same time: one is the human drama, the other is a grand narrative of societal change. Both frequently swap places. This is very tangible in Cuarón’s Children of Men — a sci-fi film set in a dystopian near future.
['Steven Gambardella']
['Movies', 'Politics', 'Philosophy', 'Culture', 'History']