Roma film review: Alfonso Cuarón’s follow-up to Gravity is a meandering, neorealist valentine to the Mexico City

Alfonso Cuarón is that rare thing, a director who has achieved the holy trinity of relevance, critical acclaim and widespread popularity. His last film, Gravity, was a CGI spectacular with a $100m budget. What better way to follow it than with a meandering, neorealist valentine to the Mexico City of his youth?

Roma’s unhurried, ethereal tone is set by a beguiling opening shot, which shows foamy water being mopped across an ornate stone floor as the opening credits roll. The woman doing the mopping is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a housekeeper for a middle class family, and the house she tends to is an imitation of Cuarón’s childhood home, pieced lovingly together from memory and given life by an immersive set designed obsessively down to the last detail. The family comprises four unruly children, their overburdened mother, and a patriarch who is initially heralded as a Godfather-type figure but turns out to be a risible coward (more Fredo than Don Corleone).

The film is a composite of various narrative threads – Cleo’s unplanned pregnancy by an immature and flighty martial arts enthusiast; the father’s explained but suspiciously prolonged absence; all of which are set against an ambient backdrop of political tumult.

Typically of a Cuarón film, it’s beautifully designed, full of both small intricacies and the long, expansive tracking shots that have become his trademark. Cuarón’s virtuosic talent as a cinematographer is much in evidence – he constructs scenes better than any working director – but what struck me most about Roma was the sound design. Every aural detail is tended to, every minute fragment of urban life given full voice (though it will be available on Netflix, it really should be seen in a cinema). It’s the kind of paean to a city and a time that only a native could make.

The film’s moral centre is a shattering performance from Aparicio, a first time actor from rural Oaxaca who had never visited Mexico City before being cast. She rarely shows outward emotion, instead giving the role incredible expressivity and depth using nothing but her face. Cleo is young and poorly educated, but in Aparicio’s hands she also seems infinitely knowing and jaded beyond her years; a consequence of her social class in a film that has a keen awareness of it.

In another director’s hands, this mix of social commentary and dreamscape reverie might amount to an incoherent mishmash of contradictions. But Cuarón is a master. He seamlessly suffuses the personal with the grand and opaque, producing each in the other and creating something that’s deeply intimate and yet has a vast thematic scope.

Films like this rarely get widespread popular attention, but Roma will be afforded it because of Cuarón’s standing in Hollywood. It fully deserves it too, along with the Foreign Language Oscar it is tipped for.