David Brendan O'Meara

Warning: spoilers
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Before I came to Mexico, I had seen Roma once on Netflix. (Once all the way through, that is, but in three parts, three nights, three sessions.) And before that, I was aware of the film. A few months ago, I had glanced at the news of its appearance at the New York Film Festival, just glancing, as I usually try to do with a film I haven’t yet seen, trying to gather just enough information to figure out whether this one might be something I want to see.

I also knew that Roma was a film of personal memory from Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Children of Men, my favorite movie so far this century. I also knew that the title of his new work referred to Colonia Roma, a neighborhood of Mexico City, and not to the ancient empire (at least not directly); and that it was a return, for Cuarón, to the Spanish language, in contrast to the Hollywood movies with which Cuarón had won his world-wide fame, those exercises in various genres elevated to deeply personal works by his extraordinary cinematic skills. In short, then, I was vaguely aware of Roma as a film I might want to see someday, but I wasn’t waiting for it.

And then, a few weeks ago, I was opening Netflix one evening, planning to watch a Spanish-language TV show. I’ve been using the streaming service as private TV channel, with a different show every night at 8 o’çlock: a list that included, among others, Wild District, from Colombia, that deals with the of lives of recently reintegrated revolutionaries, lives that straddle the worlds of law-enforcement and organized crime; El Marginal, from Argentina the story of life in an ultra-corrupt prison in Buenos Aires; and Grand Hotel, from Spain, a melodrama from the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th, set in a luxury hotel that proves to be almost as corrupt—although featuring a much better-looking and better dressed cast—than the Argentinian prison. That night, as always, Netflix showed me an advertisement  for some of its new programming, and that night, unlike most nights, I was very interested: the ad was for Roma. Out of the blue, the film was available, right then, included in my subscription, just a click away.  And in that moment, I started to watch it.

I watched it the way I watch “my series”: with audio in Spanish—the original—and subtitles in Spanish as well. (This is why Netflix is such a great tool for learning another language). In addition, Roma has subtitles in Spanish for some occasional dialog in Mixteco, which made it a little bit difficult, for this foreigner, to tell the subtitles from the subtitles. The film drops the viewer into the middle of the ordinary life of an professional class Mexican family in the early 1970s, a household with four exuberant kids, a dog, a grandmother, two live-in maids, one chauffeur, a high-strung mother and a usually-absent father. The focus of the early scenes seemed to be the daily activities of one of the maids, a friendly, patient and caring young woman named Cleo, whose duties ranged from maintaining the emotional stability of the rambunctious kids to cleaning up copious quantities of dog shit. I found the black-and-white images of Roma gorgeous, it’s unblinking gaze intriguing, and the experience, on the whole, poetic, but at the same time I began to feel a sense of dread. My fear came from a lifetime of consuming narratives, from an internalized sense of the rules of storytelling: an exposition of a normal, happy life means that something horrible is going to happen, especially if the exposition lingers on poetic details. After forty minutes, more or less, I hit the stop button, pretending to myself that Roma was just an episode of a telenovela that had reached the conclusion of an episode.

And so Roma took its place in my rotation of series, although obviously it belonged to a different category of visual storytelling, one that deserved more dedicated attention. But that’s the way you watch Netflix: in bites and binges, in episodes that end with resolutions that satisfy but don’t satisfy, because there are so many open questions that there’s nothing to do but watch the next episode.

Roma doesn’t have that structure. Its moments congeal into a plot through the slow accumulation of details over the course of two and a quarter hours. It’s a movie made for the theater, in other words, although it was produced by Netflix. Nonetheless, I watched it in three sesions of 40 to 50 minutes, more or less. I finished it the night before I left for my vacation in Mexico, and I felt, amid the many strong emotions provoked by the film, that there had been something wrong in the way I had watched it. I resolved to see Roma in a theater (the odd thing — or the new thing–about Roma is that it was released by Netflix online several weeks before it premiered in theaters.) I wanted to see Roma in the city in which it takes place, although a city 47 years older, a city that had changed it’s official abbreviation from DF to CDMX, and I wanted to see Roma, the film, in Colonia Roma, the neighborhood.

Well, I could not fulfill that last desire. I checked on the internet and found a multiplex in Roma (or very close), but on its website I learned that all the showings or Roma were sold out for the rest of December–which is to say, for the entire 10 days of my vacation. Here in downtown, very close to my Airbnb apartment, I found another option: La Casa de Cine, a small place dedicated to cinema as a art, an art house cinema par excellence. There, Roma was sold out only one or two showings in advance. I bought a ticket, came back later that day, and watched Roma in the tiny screening room of La Casa, a place with less than 50 seats. It wasn’t a perfect experience, but it was a communal experience, and that’s what mattered

First the imperfection: the screen at the front end of the narrow room was too small, and so La Casa showed the film in the 16:9 aspect ratio of contemporary widescreen TVs, instead of the 2.35:1 ratio of widescreen cinema. This meant that the right and left sides of the image were simply not there,  cut off, omitted. For example, in one of the subtlest, saddest and oddly comic scenes of the film, the family sits, glum and wordless, eating ice cream cones in a plaza after the Mom has told the kids that Dad isn’t coming home soon, and in fact is moving his things out of their house while they visit the beach. Cleo also has an ice cream cone, but she’s standing, watching over the family, ready to run an errand if necessary. In the background, there’s a party with music.  Everyone but Cleo completely ignores the party. This is what the scene looked like at La Casa del Cine:

Actually, this is screen capture from Netflix, cropped to my memories of the aspect ratio. And here is what the full scene looks like, also screen-captured from Netflix:

Now we can see the bride and groom, and we know what kind of party this is: a wedding. In widescreen, then, we get the full meaning of Cuarón’s composition: a broken family in the foreground, a community celebrating a couple’s new life together in the background, and a giant crab looming over all, for some, a happy, sexy companion, and for others, a nightmarish symbol of the imminence of divorce .

But whatever was lost in the screen size at La Casa was more than made up for by  the experience of seeing the film in a crowded theater. In a theater, no one is holding a remote control, there’s no temptation to stop the show, and in fact there is intense social pressure to sit still and watch the film from beginning to end. It is no longer an individual, private experience, but a communal one. The sense that bad things might happen doesn’t threaten to make me uncomfortable but rather provokes an almost palpable sense of shared concern. And the crowd laughs, not all the time, but often enough, especially in the scene where Cleo’s boyfriend shows off his martial arts moves in full-frontal nudity. This is a moment that will lose its charm when Cleo, and the audience, looks back on it, but in its hour it’s absurd, impressive and hilarious.

Yes, as I feared when I first watched it at home in Milwaukee, horrible things do happen in Roma: a devastating personal tragedy, a broken family, and a searing social-political outrage in the streets. I had wanted to see Roma as part of a comunal, committed and focused audience, and I was lucky to find such an audience here the city where Roma is not only took place but now is clearly becoming part of the collective memory. Using Netflix on my computer or on my TV, I can start, stop, search, rewind, do screen captures and analyze compositions. But only in the theater, where I wasn’t the alone, could I really take the journey of the film, and  feel, moment by moment, it’s contradictions, ironies and tenderness.