Venice Film Festival 2018: Roma review - An extraordinary homecoming for Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón

David Sexton30 August 2018

The London-based Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s last film, Gravity, opened Venice Film Festival five years ago and won him an Oscar.

To make Roma, he returned to Mexico City for the first time in 18 years and it is evidently autobiographical, 90 per cent of its scenes “taken out of my memory”, about people he loves deeply, he says.

We learn the routines of a bourgeois family in the Seventies: four children (the youngest, a boy evidently the young Cuarón, imaginative and keen on astronauts) living with their parents, grandmother, two maids and an ebullient dog in a comfortable house. Then changes come.

The father leaves, pretending to have gone to Canada for work. The children’s tireless, loving maid Cleo (previously unknown Yalitza Aparicio, terrific) falls pregnant to a vain martial arts enthusiast, who disowns her, and her baby is stillborn.

Powerhouse performance: Yalitza Aparicio in Roma

When the abandoned mother takes her family on a beach holiday, to tell them their father is not coming back, Cleo saves two of the children from drowning. She is the one who, selflessly and faithfully, holds the family together.

Yet Roma is not about events but about looking and seeing, in loving memory. It was shot, by Cuarón himself and not his usual cameraman Emmanuel Lubezki, in high-resolution wide-format 65mm black and white film, the camera movements gentle, revealing all to us, both in detail and scope, with an extraordinary effect of yearning and tenderness: instantly eidetic.

That effect would be lost almost entirely on a small screen — yet Roma has been bought by Netflix (which may yet give it the theatrical release it demands). Cannes Film Festival haughtily dropped Roma from its line-up for that reason: its loss is Venice’s great gain.

Venice Film Festival 2018 - In pictures

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