"Roma": Catholic Cultural Subtext and Powerful Cinematography

Image Credit: Theatrical Poster

On Saturday night I had the good fortune to see "Roma", the indie movie produced by Netflix that has created quite a buzz over the past two months. This movie is likely to win several academy awards due to its cinematography and directing. Had it been up to major movie producers and distributors it would never have seen the light of day because the industry, perhaps accurately, did not see an artsy non-English language film, which was shot in black and white, as being a smash hit at the box office in the United States. What the film may have lacked in its commercial appeal to mass audiences it has more than made up in its craftsmanship and artistry.

This film is more of a cinematic meditation of images than it is a conventional story, but its details and the sudden twists that become life and death circumstances are powerful enough to move even the most jaded and desensitized viewers.

The film is rich in symbolism about families and their disintegration and renewal, and about faith that has been infused within the general culture, even when the life of faith is not practiced in an ostentatious way. The film is very Catholic in the sense that one encounters a deeper meaning through everyday life and circumstances than what appears on the surface. The film is also about the tensions and transcendence of race, class, violence and the plight of women. This includes the plight of both affluent women and domestic workers.

The film is loosely based on the life of its director, Alfonso Cuaron, who also directed "Gravity" and "Children of Men".  Cuaron grew up in an affluent section of Mexico City, called Roma, during the early 1970s. It is from this section of town that the movie takes its name. It is filmed in three languages. It was mostly filmed in Spanish but there is also a language that is spoken by the indigenous population, and snippets of English in some of the scenes.

Seminarians will be particularly interested in how the movie handles topics such as unexpected pregnancies, families that are falling apart, social justice for domestic workers, and the curious ways in which a masculine identity is acted out at the expense of the dignity of women.

Cuaron, the director of the film, is a master of cinematic detail; what Cuaron was able to do with images in the film is itself worth the price of admission.

The character who represents Cuaron in the film is a young boy who captures viewer's hearts with his precociousness and his practice of referring to a time "When I was older...", by which he means a time before he was born. The boy's vivid imagination allows him to "remember" a previous life in which he was an adult. But the movie is not centered on the boy. The focal point of the movie turns out to be Cleo, a domestic worker, who is responsible for taking care of the child and his siblings. In a comical, but also symbolically significant way, the film also focuses on a dog that leaves impressive piles of feces all over the place.

Without giving the story away, viewers should note contrasts and recurring images: the enclosed space within the garage and airplanes flying overhead; viewers should note the recurrence of the impressively defecating dog and other dogs in general; viewers should note the imaginary guns, toy guns, and the real guns that appear in the film. They should note the recurrence of the marching band and the symbolic significance of the car that enters the garage, carefully at first, and later recklessly.

There are also the destructive forces of fire and water when the family goes on vacation, and there is the transition in how Cleo is treated -- at least up to a point -- from merely being an employee to having a role that more closely resembles the status of being a member of the family.

Another significant contrast in the film occurs in the scenes where Cleo and adults members of the family she works for, prepare for the birth of a new life under difficult circumstances, and the persistently threatening shadow of violence and death that hovers in the background.

The men in the film are only supportive of Cleo up to a point; they never seem to muster up the courage to stand with her when it is time to deliver the baby. It is the women (the lady of the household, the religious grandmother, Cleo's coworker in domestic service, and the female pediatrician) who are there for her through thick and thin.

In terms of the film's handling of the politics of social class, I can imagine some viewers criticizing it for a kind of "Uncle Tom" narrative in which the domestic servant overcomes social divisions by sacrificing everything -- her own personal life, the village of her upbringing and her own family -- for the privileged family she serves, but there is also something that is very "Christian" about the film in its depiction of vulnerability and mutual dependence that transcends racial status and socio-economic class. An underlying message is that one's humanity transcends one's social status and identity.

After two hours of enjoying the superb direction and cinematography, you will develop something akin to having a photographer's eye that allows you to appreciate details in the world around you and the director teaches you how to "see" in new and surprising ways.