How Roma Makes Mexico City Feel Like a Place You Know

The first thing we see in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is a tiled floor. Water runs over it, then pulls back. For a moment, an airplane passes through the reflection. Whoever is washing the floor has probably done it a hundred times. The person watching the movie has probably never looked at a floor being washed for quite this long.

That opening gives us a good idea of how the rest of the film will work. Cuarón, who drew on his childhood in Mexico City, sets the story in the early 1970s and follows Cleo, an Indigenous domestic worker played by Yalitza Aparicio. There are big events ahead, both inside the family’s house and out on the street. But first there is a chore to finish. The Criterion Collection

A neighborhood seen through its routines

Some of the film’s funniest moments take place in the family’s narrow driveway. A big car inches in, with very little space on either side. There’s something recognizable about the effort involved. If you’ve ever squeezed into a tight parking spot, you know the feeling. But the driveway is also Cleo’s workplace. When the car finally fits, someone still has to clean up after the dog.

The house feels familiar because we see how often people cross the same spaces for different reasons. The children can go to the rooftop when they want to play. Cleo goes up there to hang laundry. From the roof, you can see other buildings and other people going about their day. Their routines are close enough to notice, even though we know almost nothing about them.

The streets work in much the same way. There are cars, shopfronts and people with somewhere to be. Cuarón gives Mexico City enough space on screen that you can find your own details in it. On a second viewing, you might spend less time watching where Cleo is going and more time noticing who is coming the other way.

There’s another kind of distance inside the house. Cleo and Adela, who also works for the family, speak Mixtec with each other and Spanish with the family. Listen to the change when the two women are alone. There’s an ease to their conversation that we rarely hear when someone is calling Cleo from another room. We get to spend time with her when nobody in the family needs anything from her.

Who gets to decide what we see?

Imagine two people filming the same walk through Colonia Roma. One holds a phone steady across the street. The other wears camera glasses, like those in the Kylie Jenner Meta glasses collection. The phone can stay on a shop entrance after someone has walked inside. The glasses follow the wearer’s head, so a passing bus might pull the entire shot away from the shop. Where the camera sits changes whose attention we follow.

In Roma, we can be close to Cleo without seeing the city through her eyes. When she goes shopping for a crib and a student demonstration outside turns violent, the store window gives her and the viewer a view of the street below. Then the violence enters the store. The distance between a personal errand and something happening to the whole city disappears within a single scene. We’ve spent enough time with Cleo by then to know what she came for. That makes what interrupts her feel all the more frightening.

The wide framing also gives Aparicio room to be still. In a crowded scene, an actor can pull your attention with a gesture or a line. Here, you often find yourself looking for Cleo’s reaction because you’ve grown used to watching her quietly take in what’s happening around her.

The scene draws on the 1971 attack on student demonstrators known as the Halconazo. Cuarón gives us the incident from the height of a shop window, where shoppers can see enough to know something is wrong without having any control over what happens next. It is an uncomfortable place to put an audience. A few moments earlier, there was still time to choose a crib.

What you hear beyond the frame

The black and white photography tends to get the first mention when people talk about Roma, but try listening to the film for a minute with your eyes closed. The city keeps going. Engines pass. Dogs bark. Voices drift in from somewhere nearby. Indoors, a radio or television can be on while people talk and work. Music usually comes from somewhere the characters themselves could hear it, which helps each room and street feel like part of a larger place.

That sense of space matters when the film leaves Mexico City for the coast. At the beach, the waves fill the soundtrack. As Cleo wades farther out, you can still see the shore, and the distance she has to cover becomes harder to ignore. A tighter shot might tell us what she’s feeling. The view Cuarón chooses gives us time to think about what she’s doing and how difficult it is.

Think back to the rooftop. Up there, the city spreads out around Cleo, full of neighbors going about their day. At the beach, the horizon is just as wide, yet there is almost nothing for the eye to settle on except a person and the water around her. The same roominess that lets us look around the city makes it almost impossible to look away from Cleo at the coast.

The places we pass every day

By the end, the film brings us back to the house and to the work that keeps it running. There’s laundry again. There’s another trip up the stairs. These are familiar movements by now, though our sense of the person making them has changed.

That’s the part of Roma that tends to stay with me. I remember the beach and the crowded street, but I also remember that wet floor. Next time you watch the opening, see how long you look at the plane before your attention returns to the tiles. For a second the floor becomes sky.

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