Alfonso Cuarón’s patient domestic drama is worth the time it asks for, chiefly for Yalitza Aparicio. Its careful compositions sometimes keep us at a distance, but the housekeeper at its centre never disappears into the scenery.
Roma is a moving drama about domestic work and the people who can take it for granted, though its careful pace asks for patience. Alfonso Cuarón writes and directs a story drawn from childhood memory, set in 1970s Mexico City and centred on the housekeeper Cleo Gutiérrez. That choice gives the familiar family drama someone different to follow: the woman employed to keep daily life running when the family is struggling. The film spends enough time on her routines to make their demands felt.
Yalitza Aparicio makes Cleo’s quietness absorbing without turning every look into a request for sympathy. We were moved by the long takes of Cleo’s household work, because they made us sit with time that other people in the house take for granted. The performance gives those stretches enough feeling to hold our attention without a confrontation or a speech. We remain aware that Cleo is at work while other people are at home, even when the affection between them is plain.
As cinematographer, Alfonso Cuarón uses wide black-and-white frames and long takes to keep the housekeeper and the space around her in view. Foreground and background remain legible, so we can look beyond the central figure without losing her. It is an effective way of showing how little privacy there can be in a life spent attending to other people. Occasionally the compositions are so carefully arranged that we start inspecting the picture instead of following Cleo, and the stillness becomes a little forbidding.
Eugenio Caballero’s production design makes the household feel inhabited, even under the scrutiny of those wide shots. The period detail remains available for inspection throughout the long takes, but it rarely seems to be competing with the people. The intricate sound design helps keep that carefully reconstructed setting from feeling inert. We can admire the depth of the image without forgetting that this is a place where people have to live and work.
Editors Alfonso Cuarón and Adam Gough leave the domestic routines room to unfold, making their duration part of our understanding of Cleo’s job. Cutting away sooner would make the work easier to overlook. The episodic construction is less consistently effective: some stretches feel as though they are waiting for us to finish admiring them. At 135 minutes, the film occasionally presses too hard on our willingness to watch and wait, particularly when the composition has already told us what we need to know.
The harder question is how much of Cleo we are allowed to know beyond her usefulness to this family. Alfonso Cuarón recognises the class difference, and the camera gives her working life an unusual amount of space, but the film’s gratitude sometimes makes us wish it would allow her to be more difficult. Yalitza Aparicio keeps that concern from taking over: her restraint suggests feelings that the household cannot simply claim to understand. We do not need a speech explaining her, though there are moments when we want the reverence to relax.
Do not come to Roma expecting the family’s troubles to arrive as a tidy sequence of confrontations and explanations. The film asks us to spend time with a woman whose work would usually be hurried past, and trusts that she can hold our interest. For us, she does, even when the elaborate framing briefly gets in her way. Give it an uninterrupted evening; the quiet scenes need more attention than a distracted viewing can spare.
