Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘ROMA’ takes Venice by storm

In his first film since the Oscar-winning space drama Gravity, Academy Award-winning director Alfonso Cuarón’s comes down to Earth for his most personal film yet, ROMA.

Set in Mexico City and inspired by the women in his life, ROMA chronicles a year in the lives of a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City.  Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a young domestic worker Cleo from Mixteco heritage descent and her co-worker Adela (Nancy García García), also Mixteca, who work for a small family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma. Mother of four, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), copes with the extended absence of her husband, Cleo faces her own devastating news that threatens to distract her from caring for Sofia’s children, whom she loves as her own. While trying to construct a new sense of love and solidarity in a context of a social hierarchy where class and race are perversely intertwined, Cleo and Sofia quietly wrestle with changes infiltrating the family home in a country facing confrontation between a government-backed militia and student demonstrators.

The Wrap’s Alonso Duralde pleads: “Shot in 65mm black-and-white — please, Netflix, let audiences see this movie projected in 70mm before it hits your streaming service.” Duralde says, “There are, to be sure, impressive set pieces and powerful scenes, but it’s the quiet, quotidian moments that give the film its power.” On the performances, Duralde continues, “The ensemble is well cast throughout, with even the performers in the smallest roles making an impact. Ultimately, this is Aparicio’s show: She communicates both in Spanish and an indigenous dialect known as Mixteca, but she’s got the expressive eyes of a silent-film goddess. One of the film’s most wrenching scenes is just a hold on Cleo’s face, and Aparicio turns the moment into the screen’s most powerful close-up since Nicole Kidman in “Birth.”

Vulture’s Emily Yoshida says: “We follow approximately a year in the life of Cleo, a domestic worker for a doctor’s family, and much of it is episodic and observational. But it’s also a grand, epic tale on the scale of Gone With the Wind — and as a result, more a portrait of a time and place than a specific character. The resurgence of the 1968 student movement rumbles in the background, along with fires and crashing waves and the earth itself, and the personal intersects with the movements of the wider world, as it tends to do in real life.”

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman waxes: “For all its dust and flow and sprawl, there’s hardly a moment in “Roma” that isn’t orchestrated for our observance from on high, and that’s one reason why a lot of people are likely to hail it as some sort of masterpiece. “Roma” is no mere movie — it’s a vision, a memory play that unfolds with a gritty and virtuosic time-machine austerity. It’s a Proustian reverie, dreamed and designed down to the last street corner and scuffed piece of furniture. Yet I actually think it’s far from a masterpiece, because as a viewing experience it has a slightly hermetic coffee-table-book purity. Every moment comes at you in the same methodically objective and caressing Zen way.”

The Playlist’s Jessica Kiang says: “The highest compliment that can be paid is that, again, it does not feel like this world was created but uncovered just the way it is, as though it had been trapped in amber for five decades, or caught in a sudden Vesuvian eruption, with food left on tables, books half-read on nightstands and dogs frozen mid-jump at the gate. The level of skill it takes to create this effect cannot be overstated: this is personal filmmaking taken to such an extremely minute level that at times it can almost feel prurient, like we’re accidentally eavesdropping on things too private for our ears, like we’ve intercepted an embrace sent back through time and not really meant for us at all.”