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“She doesn’t have grand speeches, but in the end, she’s someone who binds together an entire family.” —Alfonso Cuarón, quoted by Marcela Valdes.
Oscar-award winning “Roma” is remarkable for many reasons—its focus on the life of a Mexican domestic worker, its meticulous recreation of a 1970s neighborhood in Mexico City, its muted but powerful evocation of political conflict, resonant soundtrack, and gorgeous black and white imagery. But if you are anything like me, you don’t fall in love with a movie unless it touches your heart.
Eager to see the film, I committed the dedicated moviegoer’s biggest sin; I watched it on Netflix. Far from feeling distanced from the action, I was so drawn in that when Cleo wades into the ocean to rescue two of her family’s children I hit the pause button. It was around midnight, and I couldn’t bear to watch the tragedy I felt sure was about to unfold. The only question in my mind was how many of them would drown. So certain was I of this outcome that I deferred it to morning.
“Roma” presents us with a steady escalation of turmoil: personal, environmental, and political. First, the father of the family departs, ostensibly to attend a professional meeting, but never to return. Then Cleo becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Fermin, who abandons her forthwith. Interleaved with these emotional upheavals, we witness two natural disasters: an earthquake at the hospital where Cleo’s pregnancy is confirmed, and a fire on the property of a wealthy relative where the family spends New Year’s. Six months later when the Corpus Christi student demonstration turns into a massacre, she goes into premature labor only to deliver a stillborn baby. How could I not assume that her story would end badly?
Why did I care?
I think it’s because Cleo, in her role as the nanny, so obviously loves the children she tends. She wakes them with soft touches, dresses Pepe (the smallest), prepares his breakfast, takes him to school and walks him home, cuddles with the older ones in the living room while watching TV, tucks them in at night, and sings them to sleep. She is more of a parent than either father or mother if we think of parenting as attending to a child’s primary needs. She even plays with Pepe, entering easily into his imaginative games. She tells them all that she loves them, and they respond in kind.
The early parts of the film, which seem so quietly domestic, made me think about how our caregivers teach us to love. As a new mother or father, you may not feel an immediate surge of love for your infant, but the process of feeding, soothing, bathing and comforting creates the first bonds of affection and attachment—on both sides.
Even Freud, the intrepid explorer of the modern subjectivity, paid tribute to the nanny who looked after him in the first years of his life, crediting her with giving him “the means for living and going on living” (Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, October 3, 1897). Yet when it came time for the grand theory he ignored her influence and that of his beautiful young mother in favor of the figure of a powerful paternal figure. Little boys, he famously claimed, want to do away with daddy in order to marry mommy. What stops them is daddy’s threat of castration. Mommies (and nannies) in this story quietly disappear.
Nothing could be farther from the reality of “Roma,” where Sr. Antonio willfully abandons his wife, daughter, and three sons. As a result, the children find themselves in a household run by women: their mother Sofia, their maternal grandmother Teresa, the cook Adela, and Cleo, their nanny. These women support one another and Cleo in her pregnancy, but it is Cleo who claims our affection, not only because of Cuarón’s choice to foreground her story but also because she embodies the principle of love that binds the family together in the midst of turmoil and loss.
In this sense “Roma” is post-Freudian, as subsequent theorists (including Freud’s own daughter Anna) focus on the infant’s first encounters with the world at large, most often mediated by a woman. Attachment Theory, which explores the drama of infant development in the first months and years of life, suggests that we learn not only how to form emotional ties to others in this crucial phase but also how to begin to imagine the mind of another, and hence to develop the capacity for empathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory. Such a caregiver need not be the child’s mother, much less female, although in our social system it most often is. For both Freud and Cuarón, it was a nanny, a woman whose role was silent, yet central, to the cohesion of family life as a whole.
When I finally watched the scene where Cleo strides into the ocean, risking her life for two of her family’s children, I felt extreme anxiety. Cuarón prolongs our suspense for a reason.
This long-take sequence culminates in the family’s huddling together on the sand, affirming their love for Cleo and prompting her guilt-laden admission about not wanting her unborn child. In this single image, it is impossible to distinguish between one family member and another. They form a unit. Nothing could be more moving as a testimony to the density and complexity of their love.
Another film on this subject might explore further the inner life of Cleo (which Cuarón portrays through Cleo’s mobile facial expressions rather than her spoken dialogue), but it is wrong to fault him in this regard. As I watched Cleo struggle back to the beach with a child firmly grasped in each hand, I broke down and cried.
“Roma” is not only a tribute to Liboria Rodriguez, Cuarón’s indigenous “second mother,” but to all of the unsung nannies of the world.
