The work of home

My Mirror column: Alfonso Cuaron’s exquisite portrait of 1970s Mexico places a maid at its centre, producing a film that is as stately as it is intimate, as harrowing as it is tender.

Not too far into Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, which released on Netflix on December 15, a man gets a much younger, slighter woman to carry his bags. It is only after the 20-year-old Cleo has, with some difficulty, dragged the heavy luggage out and lifted it into the car boot that the man of the house walks up, making an ineffectual offer of ‘help’. It’s as if it’s her luggage, not his. What the scene really reveals, though, is how both master and servant see it as her job, not his. It is a minor scene, but one that typifies the magisterial new work from the director of films as various as Y Tu Mama Tambien, Gravity and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: unobtrusively shot, exquisitely performed, and relentless in laying out the unquestioned social hierarchies that underpin our lives. Set in the early 1970s, in the Mexico City of Cuaron’s childhood, Roma takes us through a year or so in the life of an upper middle class family— but from the perspective of the household’s maid, who also doubles up as nanny to the four children. It is a large and boisterous household, and Cleo and the other maid Adele are constantly on their feet: cleaning up after the dog, attending to the children, cooking the meals, washing and ironing and sweeping and scrubbing. In one of the film’s loveliest moments, one of the children lies down in the back courtyard, pretending to be dead. Cleo leaves the clothes she is scrubbing for a minute and joins him, the washed clothes on the line dripping gently onto them. “Hey, I like being dead,” says Cleo. For her, such a moment of quiet nothingness is exceptionally rare, and Cuaron marks that fact –without emphasis. There is no emphasis laid, either, on another moment that reveals the strangely mixed circumstances produced by domestic labour. The whole family is on a sofa watching TV. Cleo hovers on the edges, serving, adjusting, half-watching. She is drawn into the circle by one of the children stretching an affectionate arm around her, but even as she seats herself tentatively on a floor cushion beside the sofa, the moment of pause is immediately interrupted by the mistress asking the maid to bring the master a tea. But the mistress can also hug her departing husband with terrifying desperation in front of the maid; Cleo is to her as much of a harmless intimate as her own watching child. This is not a film that makes the mistake of treating people as good or bad, ugly or beautiful. Cleo must work non-stop, and she has little choice about anything —but as Cuaron shows consummately, this is simply the nature of things. The stratification is assumed, but it does not preclude affection.

Roma joins a growing body of films about the complexity of the relationship between domestic workers and bourgeois employers, especially children. Played with exceptional grace and gravity by Yalitza Aparicio, a non- professional actor whose own mother has worked in domestic service, the character of Cleo is based on Cuaron’s own childhood nanny Libo (to whom the film is dedicated).

Watching the scenes where Cleo lovingly wakes up each child individually reminded me of another great filmmaker’s recreation of his childhood— Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, in which the maid Maj tells the child Alexander that he can’t sleep in her bed tonight, “but you know you’re my sweetheart”. The effervescent Maj is, like Cleo, a mother-surrogate, as is Regina Case’s older, slightly frumpier Val in Anna Muylaert’s Sao Paulo-set The Second Mother (2015), Deanie Ip’s Ah-Tao in Ann Hui’s Hong Kong-set A Simple Life (2012), or Angeli Bayani’s Filipino nanny Teresa in Anthony Chen’s Singapore-based drama Ilo Ilo (2013).

All these films depict the hapless worker who enables the smooth functioning of her employer’s household, while spending years of her life forcibly away from her own. The nanny/housekeeper/cook is often beloved within the bourgeois household – but that home will never be really hers. And outside these homes, too, these women’s status is forever compromised. Across the world, the irreplaceable work they do seems tragically to make them ineligible for their own private lives. In Ann Hui’s superb film, the only time Ah Tao loses her equanimity is when an occupant of her old-age home says snarkily on being introduced to her, “That sounds like a servant’s name”. And in one of Roma’s most distressing scenes, Cleo’s feckless martial-arts-practicing boyfriend responds to her tentatively voiced claims on him by hurling at her the worst insult he can apparently imagine: “Fucking servant!”

Cuaron’s empathy does not stop with Cleo. We weep with the children’s grandmother as she nears a nervous breakdown in trying to get Cleo to hospital on a day of street riots. We feel the shared bond between Cleo and her mistress, both abandoned by cowardly men (this has shades of the ’80s Hindi films like Kamla and Arth).

But the film ends on a note of absolute clarity. The staircase Cleo must climb at the end of the film, at the end of each day, takes her very far away from the home she supposedly inhabits. It is a bridge to nowhere.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23 Dec 2018.