Roma

by Alfonso Cuaron, Valeria Luiselli (Contributor), Carlos Somonte (Contributor)

Acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón’s most recent project, Roma, is a semi-autobiographical film focusing on a domestic worker for a middle-class family in Mexico City in the 1970s. A visual meditation, a soundscape of the oldest city in the Americas, Roma captures an intimate, unique time and space, where women provided the glue that kept the world together, yet were always invisible and inaudible. A mirror of the city it portrays, Roma is an emotional earthquake, a world about to shatter, held together by the equilibrium, tenderness, and strength of one woman, the beating heart of the story.

Film imagery by Alfonso Cuarón
Photography by Carlos Somonte
Introduction by Valeria Luiselli

172 pages, Hardcover

Published December 1, 2018

Reviews

[Josh Hornbeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a really solid script. Cuarón’s eye for detail and recreation - even in the stage directions - is astonishing. It’s interesting how the script does a much better job of keeping the narrative focused on Cleo.

[Ross Bonaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the only screenplay nominee this year shot in black-and-white, what really jumps out to me in Alfonso Cuaron's Roma screenplay is the use of color. Cuaron has such a specific idea in mind for how he wants this world to look - because this is a semi-autobiographical take on his life - and it's odd to me that he sees it as this vibrant, colorful world, when the finished project will be completely black-and-white.

I think that specificity of Cuaron's story comes through in Roma, especially since he feels the need to name every extra and give them an age, despite how irrelevant they might be to the overall story. This is a story that Cuaron lived, and through his screenplay, he's trying to get all those memories out on paper.

My biggest problem about Cuaron's film was that it pretends like this is Cleo's story, when in fact, it's really about Cuaron's surrogate family and Cleo's experiences on the fringes of that. In the screenplay, I don't feel that way. The screenplay at least makes this feel like Cleo's story, and I'll be curious if I change my mind on the perspective of the film once I revisit it. Overall, I find Roma to be a thorough, impassioned telling of Cuaron's childhood, but I don't necessarily know if that went on to make a great film.