THE TURNING OF THE EARTH
THE OPENING SCENES OF ROMA, ALFONSO CUARÓN’S first Mexican film in 17 years, draw us into a spell of domestic labor. The washing of patio tiles—which will find an eloquent rhyme in the tidal roar of the film’s climax—possesses a lulling lyricism that feels strikingly distant from the abrupt, ribald openings of Cuarón’s previous Mexican films, Sólo con tu pareja (1991) and Y tu mamá también (2001). ROMA’s protagonist, to whom these opening scenes function as a kind of ode, also represents a radical departure from her predecessors in terms of gender, class, race, temperament, and social stature. ROMA is closer to autobiography than anything Cuarón has made—the dreamy little boy who recalls a past life as a sailor would appear to be the director’s nearest surrogate in the film—yet the figure at its center is the farthest from his life experience. Octavio Paz once wrote that the “history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins.” Among the most remarkable things about Cuarón’s most personal film is that it locates his parentage in the story of Cleo, an indigenous woman inspired by the women who looked after his childhood home and helped raise him.
Of the eight features Cuarón has directed over the last three decades, only three have been Mexican. While evenly spaced across his filmography, these Mexican films feel like a separate body of work; unlike Guillermo del Toro or Alejandro González Iñárritu, the contemporaries with whom he’s most associated, Cuarón, who resides in London, seems to regard other industrial (2004), (2006), or (2013); instead, they tend toward an expansive, past-tense, novelistic sense of time, an element that in Cuarón’s English-language U.S./U.K. productions only fully emerges in (1998), which is, not incidentally, based on a novel. Unfolding over the course of 1970 and 1971, makes a span of time into almost as central a character as its heroine or her city.
