Roma

Roma

Opening Shot

Tile floor. Water. A mop moves back and forth. The camera points straight down at the soapy water, and reflected in it is an airplane crossing the sky. Cuarón opens with the intersection of the domestic and the infinite: a servant cleaning a floor, a plane heading somewhere she'll never go. The shot holds long enough that the water becomes a mirror and the airplane becomes a metaphor, and neither the servant nor the film acknowledges the poetry. The work continues.

What It Does

Cuarón shot this himself in 65mm black-and-white digital, and his camera moves with the slow, observational pans that defined his work on Children of Men but applied here to domestic space. The camera tracks across rooms, follows Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) through the house, and treats every daily task (washing clothes, serving meals, putting children to bed) with the same visual gravity usually reserved for action sequences. The long take of the hospital birth, which transitions into a stillbirth, is the most viscerally devastating single shot in Cuarón's career.

There is no musical score. The soundscape is entirely environmental: street vendors, barking dogs, television, rain on the courtyard. The absence of music forces you into Cleo's sensory experience, where there is no soundtrack to process emotions, only the ongoing noise of a life that doesn't pause for grief. The ocean sequence, where Cleo walks into the waves to save the children despite not knowing how to swim, plays against the sound of surf and screaming and nothing else.

Aparicio, a schoolteacher with no acting experience, gives a performance of such contained emotional power that it redefines what screen acting can be. Cleo absorbs everything: the family's crises, her boyfriend's abandonment, the stillbirth, the children's need. Aparicio makes the absorption visible in her posture and her silences. When she finally breaks, standing in the ocean holding the children, saying "I didn't want her," the admission is so compressed that it detonates.

Why It's on the List

Cuarón made his most personal film by centering the woman who raised him rather than himself. Roma is an act of belated recognition: the domestic worker as the hidden structural support of a middle-class family, visible to the children, invisible to the adults, carrying a grief the household can't or won't acknowledge. The film's formal strategy (no score, observational camera, non-professional lead) strips away every cinematic tool that might distance you from the experience. What's left is the thing itself.

The Argument Against

The black-and-white 65mm photography, while gorgeous, can feel like aesthetic elevation of poverty that risks making suffering look beautiful. Cuarón's directorial hand is sometimes too visible: the martial arts practice on the rooftop, the New Year's forest fire, certain compositions that feel choreographed rather than observed. And the film's perspective, while centered on Cleo, is ultimately the perspective of the child who grew up to become Alfonso Cuarón, which means it's a film about a servant made by someone who was served.

Closing Image

Cleo climbs the stairs to the rooftop where she hangs laundry. The camera tilts up to the sky. Another airplane crosses. She's still here. The work hasn't changed. The family has moved on, as families do. The sky is enormous. The frame holds on the blue. "For Libo," the dedication reads. The woman the film was made for. The woman who did the work.