Racism, brutality and our need of redemption

We’ve had a Spring and Summer of few new film releases and re-runs on TV so, perhaps like you, my screen time has been largely filled with catching up on films I’d always meant to see but never quite round to. Roma is one of those, and I’m really, really glad that I did put it on.

Made in 2018, Roma is a beautiful, black-and-white film set in Mexico. The restrained aesthetic and the film’s simple focus, following the life of a maid to a middle-class family over 12 months in 1970-1, still allows for real charm and an overwhelming emotional impact. And, in many ways, the film speaks into our current conversations about race and privilege with a distinct voice. So, don’t let the subtitles and the lack of colour put you off. Roma may be an artistic film, but it isn’t an inaccessible ‘arty’ one. It tells a compelling, even epic, story.

Quiet detail

Roma is in parts autobiographical: filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron grew up in the well-to-do Roma district of Mexico City and the film is dedicated to his childhood maid, Libo. Perhaps that explains some of the precision in the beautifully-framed tableaux which establish characters. We see the maid Cleo on the rooftop where she does the family’s laundry; water being swilled over the yard; the high gate which separates the secluded home from the busy street; children fighting over toys. It is a quiet film too, leaving space to hear caged birds sing, marching bands, horns honking and the family dog barking excitedly. Against this background we see Cleo and her mistress Sofia go through devastating loss.

There is something childlike about this perspective which takes in all the details and lingers on intimate experience, joyful or heartbreaking, without trying to explain or argue. Violence of the natural, as well as the human, world persistently recurs in Cleo’s story. In one of the early scenes a child, having just returned from school casually recounts seeing a man shot in the head by police. Later we see first-hand the violent suppression of student protests (an historical event in which 120 died), a minor earthquake and a forest fire. Yet, in all of these, the camera is, as it were, a bystander, not in the heart of the action, which accentuates the horror of the moment, as well the vulnerability of the people tied up in it. It seems to me that in this way Cuaron’s vision does justice to the strangeness and complexity of everyday life in which brutality and tenderness are so often side-by-side.

Race and exploitation

In the midst of this, and in her own personal drama of loss and abandonment, Cleo is always moving, working hard for a leisured family from dawn to after dusk, apparently serene and passive. And here’s a problem. Cleo looks like a racist stereotype, a saintly, suffering figure, admired and even loved by those she serves. She is from an indigenous village, her employers of wealthy European heritage. They depend on her and she is dependent on them, sharing a tiny, cramped bedroom with the cook at the top of the family’s spacious house, reliant on her mistress for pretty much all her needs. Is this film a sentimental and soft-focus excusing of colonialist and racist exploitation?

Some might think so until the absolutely extraordinary climax of the film, when it becomes clear that Cleo is not just a saint, but a Christ-figure, a humble servant who loves, sacrifices and saves. She is genuinely loved and supported by her employers and all of them together are sufferers in a violent world, a world which is clearly in flux, unstable and strange. Roma, in not offering interpretation, manages to tell the truth about unjust social structures and individual responsibility, but it also tells the truth about the strange complexity of human relationships and the superlative importance of love. There’s something, I think, in the film which answers the old accusation that the gospel allows for, or even encourages, exploitation through its call to follow a suffering Lord. Cleo’s dignity and strength in her service redeems a family, and in her weakness, she is united with them. This isn’t a film about Christianity, but it is a film which shows us our need of a saviour like Jesus.