Roma is monumental and ordinary

Rome is one of the most impressive movies of this century. Meticulous, grandiose and thrilling, the direction and cinematography of Alfonso Cuarón achieve the feat of re-creating the culture of the 1970s in Mexico City under the simple-minded perspective of a faithful domestic servant without losing a single important detail.

Although the camera follows all the moves of Cleo, also nanny of the four children of the couple António and Sofia, the view that we have of the large-format open plans is always from the bottom up, as if we shared with one of the children (probably the director) the admiration of monumental scenes, like the waves of the sea, which constitute, for an adult, dayly ordinary facts.

Roma was a middle-class neighborhood with luxurious homes and staffs of maids, cooks, babysitters and drivers. From dawn on, when she wakes up the children to school, until dusk, when she turns out the lights, Cleo seems to attend to all desires, serving meals, cleaning the dog Borras' droppings, washing all the clothes and whispering with the cook Adela in the Mixtec dialect.

The meticulous and safe way in which the master introduces the powerful Galaxy 500 into the tight hallway that serves as a garage is a phallic symbolism that indicates a patriarchal and masculine predominance in all the conflicts of the plot. Abandoned by him, Mrs. Sophie will say about women "we are all alone."

Interchangeable in the daily routine, there are defining moments, such as the father's trip without return, an earthquake, a broken window in a fight, a fire at New Year's party and the (almost) drowning of children in the Tuxpan sea. One of the most poignant scenes, Cleo's delivery by real doctors and nurses, comes just after one of Mexico's greatest tragedies, the Halconazo, when dozens of students were massacred by paramilitaries in 1971 Corpus Christi.

At the end of the film, the family returns to the house once more. Cleo expresses for the first time a desire: she did not want her baby.

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