The Floor
The first image in Roma is a floor being washed.
Water moves across tiles. A mop enters the frame. The water pools and spreads and reflects, for a brief moment, a plane crossing the sky overhead. Then the mop returns and the reflection disappears and the floor is clean, and someone will walk across it within the hour and it will need to be cleaned again.
Alfonso Cuarón shot this film in black and white, in 65mm, with the kind of technical precision that wins cinematography awards and gets discussed in terms of light and composition and framing. But the first image is not about any of those things. It is about a floor. It is about the fact that someone washes a floor every morning and the people who walk on it do not think about the washing. The floor is simply clean. It is clean the way air is breathable. It is clean because someone made it clean, and the making is invisible, and the invisibility is the subject of the entire film.
Cleo washes the floor. Cleo washes the dishes. Cleo washes the clothes. Cleo carries the children upstairs. Cleo turns off the lights. Cleo wakes before the family and sleeps after it. Cleo is the surface on which the household rests, and the household does not look down.
The Dog
There is dog excrement in the driveway. It appears in the first few minutes. It appears again. The driveway is narrow. The family car, a Ford Galaxy too wide for the space, scrapes the walls each time it enters. The father drives it. Then the father leaves. Then the car scrapes the walls without him. The excrement remains.
Cuarón gives you these details the way a novel gives you weather. Not as symbol. As texture. The dog, the car, the narrow driveway, the excrement that no one cleans up except Cleo. These are the facts of a household that is falling apart without admitting it is falling apart. The father is leaving. The mother knows. The children do not. And through it all, the house continues to function because Cleo makes it function, and the making requires that certain things be cleaned, carried, removed, and dealt with before anyone wakes up to notice.
This is what domestic labor is. It is the maintenance of an illusion. The illusion that the household runs itself. That the food appears. That the clothes are folded. That the children are bathed and dressed and delivered to school. The family lives inside this illusion the way you live inside a building. You do not think about the foundation. You do not think about the plumbing. You think about the rooms.
Cleo is the plumbing.
The Rooftop
She washes clothes on the roof. The rooftop is her territory. Below, the family occupies the living room, the bedrooms, the dining table. Above, on the concrete slab where the clotheslines run, Cleo works in the open air. Planes cross overhead. The city sprawls in every direction. From up here, the household below is small. A box. A container. A thing she services and returns to and services again.
Cuarón films the rooftop sequences with a camera that pans slowly, taking in the full width of the skyline. The pans are beautiful. They are also strategic. They show you how much world exists around the household that the household does not see. The family lives in a neighbourhood in Roma, in Mexico City, in Mexico, in 1970, and the country is in political upheaval, and students are being killed, and the household notices none of it, because the household is a closed system, and Cleo is the mechanism that keeps it closed.
Up on the roof, Cleo can see everything. The city. The sky. The distance. And then she goes back downstairs and folds the laundry.
Fermín
She has a boyfriend. His name is Fermín. He practices martial arts shirtless in a field and talks about discipline and training and the man who saved his life through physical rigour. He is handsome and confident and full of the kind of certainty that young men from difficult backgrounds construct out of ideology and repetition. Cleo sleeps with him. Cleo gets pregnant.
Fermín disappears.
Not slowly. Not with the drawn-out agony of the father’s departure from the household. Fermín vanishes the moment Cleo tells him. He is at a movie theatre. She tells him she is pregnant. He says he is going to the bathroom. He does not come back.
The scene is almost comic in its economy. The oldest trick. The excuse so transparent it is not even an excuse, it is an exit, and Cleo is left sitting in a movie theatre watching a film she was not watching, holding information that has just become her problem and hers alone.
Later, she finds him. At a training field. Surrounded by paramilitaries. He looks at her and tells her the child is not his and she should not have come. He threatens her. And in that threat, the film connects the private violence to the public violence that has been gathering at the edges of the frame. Fermín is not simply a bad boyfriend. He is a young man who has been recruited by a political structure that channels male anger into discipline, discipline into ideology, ideology into murder. The Corpus Christi massacre is coming. Fermín will be there. He will be holding a weapon. And Cleo, standing in a furniture store, will watch him point it at civilians, and her water will break, and the public and the private will collapse into the same body at the same moment.
The Hospital
The birth scene is the centre of the film, and it is filmed with a cruelty that is indistinguishable from honesty.
Cleo is taken to a hospital that is crowded and loud and understaffed. She is placed on a table. The doctors work. The baby does not cry. The baby is stillborn. Cleo is shown the body. She holds it. The camera holds on her face, and her face does something that Yalitza Aparicio, a first-time actress with no professional training, should not be able to do. It holds grief and endurance at the same time, without letting either one win.
The baby is dead. Cleo returns to the house. She cleans. She cooks. She carries the living children up the stairs. The household absorbs her grief the way a sponge absorbs water. Not deliberately. Not maliciously. By function. The household needs her to function, and so she functions, and her functioning becomes a form of erasure. Not of the grief. Of the right to grieve. The household does not deny Cleo her sorrow. It simply does not have a room for it. Every room is occupied by the family’s needs. The laundry. The meals. The school run. The dog.
Think about what The Pianist showed you. Szpilman survived by suppressing every quality that made him a person. Cleo survives the same way, but her suppression is not imposed by a political regime. It is imposed by an economic one. She is not hiding from soldiers. She is standing in a kitchen, holding a pot, carrying a child who is not hers, and the suppression is so normalised, so woven into the structure of the household, that no one in the house would recognise it as suppression. They would call it her job.
The Beach
The family goes to the beach. The mother has told the children their father is not coming back. The mood is heavy and fractured and held together by the specific kind of determined cheerfulness that families produce when they are trying to survive a rupture without acknowledging its depth.
Two of the children go into the water. The waves are too strong. They are pulled out. Cleo, who cannot swim, walks into the ocean after them.
Cuarón films this in a single sustained shot that is among the most extraordinary in modern cinema. The camera sits at the shoreline. The waves come in. Cleo walks out. The water rises to her waist, her chest, her neck. She finds the children. She holds them. The waves hit. She holds. The waves hit again. She holds. She brings them back.
On the beach, the family gathers around her. The children cling. The mother holds her. Cleo says, through tears, that she did not want the baby. She says it in the middle of an embrace, surrounded by people who have just watched her risk her life for their children, and the confession is not a revelation. It is an opening. A crack in the surface through which something true, something that belongs to Cleo and not to the household, briefly escapes.
The family holds her. The moment is genuine. The love is real. And then they go back to the house, and Cleo carries the bags, and the structure reasserts itself, because love and labour are not the same thing, and the household runs on labour, and the labour is hers.
The Surface
This is what Roma does that no other film about domestic workers does. It does not make Cleo a saint. It does not make her a victim. It does not make the family villains. It does none of the things that a political reading would demand, because Cuarón is not making a political argument. He is making a material one. He is showing you the physical reality of a woman’s days. The water on the floor. The clothes on the line. The excrement in the driveway. The children on the stairs. The weight of these tasks, repeated daily, without recognition, without narrative, without the structure of a story that says: this matters, this is leading somewhere, this has a point.
It does not have a point. That is the point. Cleo’s labour does not accumulate into meaning. It accumulates into more labour. The floor she washed this morning will need to be washed tomorrow. The clothes she folded will need to be folded again. The children she carried will grow and leave and not carry her. The household will continue, and she will continue inside it, and the inside will look like belonging but it will be proximity, and the proximity will look like family but it will be employment, and the employment will look like nothing at all because the whole point of domestic labour is that it looks like nothing at all.
The opening shot told you everything. The floor, being washed, reflecting a plane that is going somewhere Cleo is not going. The reflection disappears. The floor is clean. No one notices.
In Schindler’s List, human beings were assigned a market price and the act of salvation was a transaction. In Roma, Cleo’s labour has no price because it has no visibility. You cannot purchase what you have not learned to see. The family loves Cleo. The film is clear about this. They love her the way you love a wall that keeps the rain out. Gratefully. Abstractly. Without ever asking what the wall carries.
What the Body Gives
Roma opens the “labor and consumption” arc of Cycle Four. After three films about bodies under history’s weight, bodies subtracted and catalogued and purchased, we arrive at a body that gives itself away. Not violently. Not under duress. Daily. Quietly. For wages the film never mentions because the film understands that mentioning them would give the labour a legibility it does not possess inside the household.
What the body carries. What the body gives. What the household takes without taking, because the taking looks like the ordinary shape of a day, and the day looks like nothing, and the nothing is everything.
Cleo washes the floor. The plane crosses the sky. The reflection vanishes.
The floor is clean.
Where This Leads Us
There is a film where four people destroy their bodies in pursuit of dreams that were never real. Requiem for a Dream is not about drugs. It is about consumption. About the body that becomes the thing it consumes, and the dream that becomes the thing that consumes the body. Where Cleo gives her body to a household that does not notice, Aronofsky’s characters give their bodies to a future that does not exist.
Cleo’s consumption was invisible. Theirs will be unwatchable.