Roma - Film directed by Alfonso Cuarón - Review by Ceylan Crow
Review by Ceylan Crow
I recently watched the movie “Roma” named after a neighborhood in Mexico City by well known Mexican Director Alfonso Cuarón. The film is shot notably in black and white as a prelude to its being from the actual memory of the director, and follows the daily life of the family maid, Cleo, in his middle-class family neighborhood.
I had some contextual knowledge so some of the seemingly unexplained scenes in the movie made sense to me. But if one has no historical knowledge of Mexican politics some scenes in the movie would be a bit of a mystery to the viewer. I think the producer would have done well to add a small paragraph at the very beginning explaining the era and some of the events of that time.
Director Alfonso Cuarón has a minimalist style, we observe the characters from a distance, slowly moving closer as the film goes on at a very slow pace. Cuarón is able to convey a lot without the help of traditional filmmaking tools, such as a background score or dialogue. The scene of the entire family sitting around the television one evening with the maid able to semi participate is a good example. The film is meant to be like a memory, distant and dreamlike. But because of this, I felt emotionally detached from the characters and a bit bored.
Towards the middle, the movie depicts a violent scene which unbeknownst to us is actually the infamous Corpus Christi massacre, the political conflict that left about 120 people dead. (I knew about the student protests and killings in Mexico so had an inkling of what was going on).
The massacre took place on June 10, 1971, it was also known as the “Hawk strike,” named for the “Halcones,” the paramilitary unit that inflicted the violence. Also known as the “Corpus Christi Massacre” because it fell on a Thursday during that holiday.
It’s in the year 1970 that Roma opens, when Luis Echeverría Álvarez, who was the interior minister at the time, was being elected president, a time when elections were heavily rigged in favor of the ruling party. Apparently, campaign posters, signs, and T-shirts supporting Echeverría and the PRI are visible in the backgrounds of several scenes, which I will look for in my second viewing.
Echeverría runs as a liberal in 1970 and, for a time, governs as one. At the same time, the government is training the Halcones for use against demonstrators with US assistance, though both sides subsequently deny this.
The following year, a conflict over authority at the University of Nuevo León in Monterrey leads the state’s Governor to send in police to occupy the campus, in May 1971 students rally support at other schools, including the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico City. This is the scene where Cleo and the grandmother are in the city shopping for a baby crib and suddenly violence erupts from a demonstration going in the street.
At the real event, the peaceful march of 7-10,000 students, taking place near the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico City is blocked by about 900 special police, who taunt them and spray tear gas, and then the crowd is attacked by about 1000 Halcones, who pull up in buses.
Earlier in the film, we see a naked Fermín, Cleo’s boyfriend, using a shower rod in place of a kendo stick, to show off his martial-arts skills to her in a motel room. With the background knowledge above, viewers can surmise that he is training to be one of the Halcones, who became known for using such weapons. By 1971, the Mexican government, in collaboration with the United States, had devised a plan to prevent uprisings from happening.
Later in the movie when Cleo goes in search of her boyfriend and finds Fermín training with a large group of men on a soccer field, there’s an American trainer and someone wearing a CIA cap, easy to miss. Fermín even mentions that a “gringo” had been training them for a while. (The United States, of course, trained a number of violent paramilitary groups during the Cold War, with the right-wing Contras in Nicaragua and the CIA-trained Bay of Pigs invaders being two more well-known examples.)
The purpose behind the Halcones was to recruit young men, particularly from poor neighborhoods, who could pass themselves off as students to more easily infiltrate campuses and repress protests, and authorities instructed them to instigate violence, as if they were students, so the police and military could claim they were provoked.
The movie is very well made as a social commentary on the social hierarchy within Mexican modern city life, and I especially noticed how within that hierarchy there is solidarity among the women even across class barriers. Also in contrast for example to middle eastern cultures the women of the underclass do have considerable sexual freedom yet are obviously uneducated and ignorant of contraception and taking care of avoiding pregnancy.
