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Roma. 2018. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 135 minutes. Mexico: Espectáculos Fílmicos El Coyúl, Pimienta Films; Los Angeles: Participant Media; Sherman Oaks, CA: Esperanto Filmoj (available on Netflix).
Roma is a film based on director Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood, but told through the eyes of his household maid, or nana. In the film, the young Mixteca housemaid Cleodegaria Gutiérrez or Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) works for an upper-middle class white family in the affluent neighbourhood of Roma, located near the historic centre of Mexico City, which brims with its own historical connection to Francophile architecture. Cleo watches over and takes care of the family with care, patience, and ease, even when the patriarch, Señor Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), a medical doctor, abandons his wife Sofía (Marina de Tavira) and their four children. After discovering that she is pregnant, Cleo moves through the motions of the everyday that are governed by the wants and needs of her employer’s family while quietly considering what she will do with her new life position.
Roma has garnered considerable international attention, winning numerous awards for cinematography and directing, and has also benefited substantially from Netflix’s intensive marketing campaign. Filmed in black and white and featuring slow, meditative tracking shots, Roma stands as a unique addition to Mexican cinema that is semi-autobiographical and documentary-like, but intertwined with fiction. Scholars and critics have honed in on Cuarón’s film with vigor, discussing his visual recreation of the city, the political and social context (particularly the focus on the 1971 Halconazo student strike and massacre), the representation of working class mestizo and indigenous characters, and the roles Cleo performs inside and outside the household. While the perspectives vary yet intersect in several ways, all can agree that this film is seeped with nostalgia, a quality which I argue is enhanced by music.
The film’s soundscape is an example of an exceptional sonic archive, saturated with music and sounds of the early 1970s and functioning as a historically-driven aural and cultural text. The film’s music, which does not include a film composer or underscoring, was carefully selected by music supervisor Lynn Fainchtein and is intricately integrated into the narrative, operating solely diegetically to enhance the realites of Roma. Fainchtein took on the challenging task of researching and compiling the...