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The Stunning and Moving Film, Roma

The Oscar-winning film, Roma (Best Foreign Language Film), tells the story of an upper-middle-class Mexican family in Mexico City in the 1970s.

There is chaos everywhere. In the streets. In political unrest. And in this family.

The father, a businessman who is often away on trips and who eventually leaves, apparently for another woman, causes profound crises within his struggling family.

The wife and mother, Sophia, tries to carry on, hiding the truth from her boisterous four children. But as times goes on she craters under the reality of her failing marriage and enveloping loneliness and she tells the children their father is not coming home.

Teresa, Sophia’s mother who lives with them, is a matronly sympathetic and caring older woman, but she is helpless in corralling the rowdy children.

It is Cleo, played by first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio, who as nanny and housemaid, successfully manages this disordered family.

The character is based on a true to life nanny who helped raise the director and writer of Roma, the brilliant Alfonso Cuarón. In Cleo, he brings to life Liboria “Libo” Rodriguez, who came to his family when he was 9 months old and whose love changed him forever.

Cleo is a small, quiet young woman who goes about her daily chores with determination and dignity. She is more than a nanny to the children. She nurtures them. She is tender and affectionate with them. She gently wakes them each morning and sings them to sleep at night. And they all adore her. In the scary disruption of their parents’ marriage, the children feel safe with Cleo. They go to her for comfort. They lay in her lap. They snuggle close to her side. They tell her they love her. She kisses their heads and says she loves them, too.

There is a scene where the mother and children and Cleo go to the beach for a day of fun, a time to get away from the sadness and confusion of their lives. The children are ecstatic and cannot wait to get into the water. They invite Cleo to join them but she can’t swim so she remains on the beach. Sophia, the mother, leaves to go to town and asks Cleo to make sure the children stay out of the ocean until she returns. The oldest one walks the beach. But the other three run right to the water. The surf is high and the waves are choppy and strong. The smallest child comes back to Cleo, tired and cold. She tends to him but watches carefully, nervously, the two who remain in the water. She sees they are in trouble. She walks out in the dangerous surf calling to the children to come. They are struggling. As she goes deeper into the water, and the children are going under and coming up with their arms in the air fighting for breath, you feel the fear, the terror in Cleo. But she never stops; she keeps walking farther out into the crashing waves until she finally reaches the children and brings them back to shore.

They all fall into the sand coughing and weeping and you want to stand and cheer this act of courage and tenderness and love.

What makes the scene so moving is not only Cleo’s resolve to risk her life to save the children, but she has just gone through the loss of her own stillborn baby. After a brief encounter with a brash and heartless young man who got her pregnant and abandoned her, she was determined to have her child. But her own baby, she could not save. And the reality of that and the ocean scene is heartbreaking, and watching it, my eyes filled with tears.

Roma, shot in black and white with subtitles, begins slowly. Some may find it tedious at first. But it builds with intensity and emotion. The late movie critic, Roger Ebert, once said the role of great cinema is to become “an empathy machine.”

Roma asks us to feel, to be moved, to open our hearts and enter the lives of others, who, like us, are trying their best to make their sometimes difficult existence mean something.


© 2019 Timothy Moody 

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