ROMA- FRAGMENTS OF MEXICO
Alfonso Cuarón, recollecting and shaping his own memories, tried to recreate the Mexico City of the 70’s. He not only succeeded in creating the physical infrastructures that existed during those times, but he also successfully created characters who in his own words “were previously usually placed in the background of a film.” On the surface, Roma is a movie about the life of Cleo who serves as a maid to an affluent family in the city. However, as we delve deeper into the movie, we discover that it’s a movie about different fragments of Mexico during the time Cuarón was growing up. The fragments encompass social issues such as infidelity and hierarchy in a society, and political issues such as the student demonstrations rampant in Mexico during the 70’s. Each characters have their own place, own understanding in Cuarón’s mind and he uses his skill as an auteur to translate this understanding into screen as much as possible. Out of all the characters he created, Cleo stands out to be the one whose perspective and understanding are used to explore the lives of all the other characters including her own.
More that halfway into the movie, Sofia pulls up intoxicated to her house, grabs Cleo and tells her how women have always been alone. This sudden reaction from her employer stuns Cleo, but she does not react she keeps quite. At this particular moment, all the social differences that existed between Cleo and Sofia dissolves and they both exist on the same plane. They have both been abandoned by their respective partners. They both share grief: one expecting a child and the other having to raise four children on her own.
Children play a vital part in the movie, almost like observers taking everything in with little or no understanding at all. They can be seen as a representation of Cuarón’s childhood as he himself claims how his father left his family just like Sofia’s husband Antonio did. One of the scene that stands out in the movie is when Toño, Sofia’s eldest child, while checking out the women in magazines with his friend outside a movie theater accidentally sees his father flirting with another woman. He quickly shuts his friend down when his friend exclaims that the man is his father. He knows it’s his father, but he does not want to believe that’s his father. He keeps it within himself. He makes himself believe that his father is still in Canada.
Something that is quite extraordinary about the movie is that Cuarón explores the tumultuous political landscape of Mexico during the 70’s using one character and two scenes. Fermin, Cleos’s lover, is a young man still in his 20’s. He is training, like many young men in the movie, to be a part of the government-trained paramilitary group known as Los Halcones (The Falcons). In 1971, Los Halcones were involved in attacking and killing student demonstrators in Mexico City. Cuarón uses Fermin to represent the young minds that are molded by extreme right-wing government ideologies to incorporate violence in their lifestyle. This ideology seems to seep into the conscious and subconscious minds of the men. Fermin’s sudden outburst towards Cleo, threatening to hurt her and the little kid is an evidence of that.
Some remarkable foreshadowing that Cuarón uses reminds me of Ray’s use of foreshadowing in Jalsaghar. The breaking of the cup right after Cleo toasts for a great and healthy start to a new year, and the block of plaster that falls from the wall covering the incubator add a sense of impeding disaster to the story that is about to turn Cleo’s life around completely. Similarly, Cuarón strongly asserts how sometimes a natural element can add to a movie just as much as a character. Water plays a crucial role throughout the movie. In fact, a seemingly quite and reserved Cleo breaks down right after she saves two kids from drowning in the sea. Water has been used as a strong symbol to convey several meanings in a movie. Water is usually treated as a symbol that signifies rebirth and transformation. Many directors like Barry Jenkins in Moonlight, Andrei Tarkovsky in Stalker have used water as a means to symbolize change and isolation.
Overall the movie deals with a past world that does not exist anymore, but Cuarón creates that world using all the available sources as meticulously as possible. As a filmmaker, predominantly working for the hollywood studio system in recent times, Alfonso Cuarón shows how filmmakers can search their own memories and tell personal stories using independent filmmaking resources.
