Netflix Month Roma (Dir Alfonso Cuarón, 2h 15m, 2018)

What is the role of Netflix in contemporary cinema? In a year where the chain have added 15 million subscribers, hold the rights to four out of the eight nominees for Best Picture, and rescued the iconic Chinese Theatre from closure, one could easily describe them as the saviours, and certainly the custodians of cinema over the pandemic, keeping the medium ticking over whilst we wait for the return of the more traditional outlets to slowly come out of their near-year long hibernation. But their role as distributor is a little more complex than this; whilst 2021's field has been aided by an (entirely necessary) change in Academy rules to allow streaming-only films to enter the Oscar, before then, the battle between old Hollywood, of the brick and mortar cinema against the young digital upstart has led to wars of words from figures as myriad as Spielberg and entire cinema chains, largely centred around the very concept of whether films released as digital-first, limited release films should even be permitted.

Much of this controversy, whilst dogging Netflix's releases for the past few years, comes from Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, a semi-autobiographical drama from the point of view of the maid of a wealthy Mexican household in the early 1970s, in a year snapshot that sees the maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) struggle with the breakup of her relationship with her boyfriend, and subsequent pregnancy, the breakup of the family, as the little-seen father exits the family after an affair, all of this against the backdrop of the civil unrest of the period. Though the film's artistic indulgences make it somewhat laden with a need to capture a zeitgeist, a veritable encyclopedic reportage of early 1970s Mexican culture, from leftist student protests to right-wing inclined television escapologists to the cinema that inspired Cuarón to take up a camera, its central portrait is a stunning first-time performance from Aparicio.

Cuarón's films have always centred, to one degree or another, around strong capable heroines, from Children of Men to Gravity and even in his most mainstream picture to date, the third Harry Potter film; certainly there are elements of his debut, 1995's A Little Princess in Roma, in which a young heiress is reduced to servitude by the death of her father, where the young woman's grace, kindness, and sympathy for others brings her through to the reappearance of her father. But where A Little Princess is the story of a child, shot through with magical realism, Roma is an altogether more grounded, more earthy piece of cinema. Much of this hinges upon Cleo herself-the film quickly sets up the distinction between her and fellow maid Adela, both from the indigenous Mexican population, and their Spanish employers, not just through the use of language (Cleo and Adela speak the native language Mixtec when alone, and Spanish to, and indeed around their employers), but through their treatment through the film. 

Roma's relationship with race, and indeed with Mexican identity, particularly when it comes to the identity of indigenous Mexicans, is complex. The film's heroine, first time actress Aparicio, is clearly a divide from the typical Mexican stars of the telenovella, one of whom racially abused her during the build up to the Oscars, and whose Oscar nomination clearly opened dialogues on national pride, as well as questions from this diaspora as to whether a sector of Mexican society used to being maids off-screen should be perpetuated by the submissive, quiet endurance of Cleo as a character. Certainly, it is somewhat surprising how little the film does address, at least at surface level, this sense of Cleo being part of a long-persecuted minority, of being Othered-the film certainly plays more along the lines of her being part of the family, with her rescue of two of the children, with whom she has a clear and undeniable bond, from the youngest boy, who discusses-imagined or otherwise-past lives with her, to the older siblings-cements her place in the family and her bond with them. By the end of the film, we are in no doubt that she does belong as part of this family unit.

Whilst the film shows her as part of the family for long stretches, accompanied either by the family matriarch, Sofia,(Marina de Tavira), or her mother, Teresa (Verónica García), to medical appointments, the family regarding her as part of it as she is invited along to occasions and holidays, Cuarón shows her as far from isolated, often in the foreground, and, particularly in the denouement of the film, surrounded by the family. However, at points, the film snaps back into place, the line between employer and servant is very clearly delineated-at one point, Sofia finds one of her children spying on her phone-call with the now absent father, lambastes them and then turns on Cleo. Elsewhere, particularly in the form of the family's father, whose off-screen rows are shielded away from both the viewer and Cleo, we see the more obvious delineation between the white Mexicans and their indigenous servants, with the mess left by dogs and the children pinned on Cleo and Adela as a misstep in their work.

Perhaps the biggest failing of the film is how little the relationship between these two is developed-Adela seems far less favoured by the family, and certainly less doted upon by them; she appears in several sequences as Cleo's confidant, and travels with the family as they go on New Years Holiday, but otherwise seems like an underutilised character-for a woman whose experience shares so much with Cleo's, Cuarón seems to almost forget about her for much of the film, until Cleo eventually begins to explain her experiences to her colleague at the very end of the film, and it's peculiar that, for a film that has so much to do with class and nationality and ethnicity, such a tantalising character is left unexplored.

Perhaps, though, the film is more keen to show what Cleo has in common with her employers; Sofia in particular is utterly sympathetic both to her maid's plight as she is left pregnant and single by the departing Fermin, and Sofia's situation, though largely eked out in the background of scenes, is that of a woman also left by their spouse, who now has to adjust to their new life, to adjust to an uncertain future. We see Sofia struggle to adapt to the lack of her husband, the colossal Ford Galaxie 500 that practically stands as a cinematic shorthand for him unwieldy and too big for her to drive, and indeed park in one memorable sequence as she scrapes down the wall; its replacement comes with the final disappearance of her husband, and the end of the film. Perhaps more than anything, she and Cleo represent the two poles of Mexican society in the early 1970s, represent the Mexican female identity.

For around them, in Cuarón's superb tracking long-shots, we are given the very culture of Mexico City in the 1970s, from student uprisings that the camera picks through and then impassively shoots during the infamous Corpus Christi massacre on 1971 through shop windows, to television programs, sections of films, that are woven into the film's texture and so on. In many of these, Cleo is a solitary figure making her way through crowds, at one point this long take taking us across roads and traffic, through street hawkers until she catches up with the children, and this comes to a head in the final scene on the beach where once again Cuarón follows her in one unbroken movement to rescue the stranded children.

This is, undeniably, as much a film about the childhood of Alfonso Cuarón as it is about its fictitious heroine; it is a meditation upon the elements that built Cuaron as a person, from his upbringing, to the outlandish, but utterly real figure of Professor Zovek, a Mexican strong-man and escapologist whose rumoured ties to right wing paramilitary group are fleshed out in full in this film, as he gives a bizarre demonstration of his powers of mind over body. Away from its female protagonists, the film is a meditation upon Mexican masculinity, of absent or selfish men, of violent machismo that, whilst acting in excellent counterpoint to the gentle Cleo, is perhaps given at once too little and too much development. In places, indeed, the film seems overstuffed with period detail, more concerned with Cuarón, in essence, recreating and paying homage to his childhood years than in telling a cohesive narrative, and whilst this perfectly meshes in places, in others it gives the film an overly baggy, and listless quality, only recovering from its overly long middle section by returning to its twin focuses, where it is undeniably at its best.

Roma, regardless of the controversies of its release-its release and Oscar nomination, in hindsight, feel like the sort of skulduggery one would expect of the now disgraced Harvey Weinstein rather than going hand-in-hand with its artful and skilfully told story-is an excellent piece of cinema, and its triumph at being only the second Mexican language picture ever to win "Best Foreign Film" alongside Best Director cannot be overshadowed by Netflix's efforts to get it there. It is dominated by its two key performances, and its masterful depiction of race, gender and the household in a film that evocatively captures the childhood of its director make it, without a doubt, one of the best films that Netflix, or, indeed Cuarón have made to date.

Rating: Highly Recommended

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