For personal, private use: download the English and Spanish language scripts in PDF here.

For me, Roma was the film of the year for 2018. It’s a rare example of a true auteur film (a film which is unbound by populist conventions and uses cinema purely as a tool for the translation of a director’s art) that is also immensely popular. Part of this is due to Netflix, part of it to do with The Oscars and other A-list awards. And though I personally attribute no value to these factors in relation to implications of quality or achievement, I’m still excited and amused by these arbitrary factors drawing in an audience who otherwise might never see as pure an example of cinema in the rest of their viewing. Roma is much less of a story about the main character, Cleo (played with an almost frustrating level of naturalism by newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) and more a chronicle of her life and times.

Cuaron unfolds the narrative in a relaxed way and with quite a lot of distance between himself and the material which nicely balances out with how deep-rooted his emotional connection to the story, the era and setting as a whole, really is. His visual style, using slow steady pans across the scenes, lends the film an eerie sense of inevitability and affords the viewer a very clear image of 1970s Mexico City. The more he swipes his camera across the terrain, the more of the image as a whole we unlock. The foreboding is introduced so early into each of the narrative arcs that upon their completion we find ourselves in a state of confused shock, coming to terms with some of the awful realities the film touches on whilst baffled by how hard these realities have hit us, given how inevitable they felt. Throughout Roma we get an intimate understanding of Cleo and her world. It's not intimate through what we're told about her life or what she herself reveals to us, it's intimate because we spend time with her. We see the things which other people in the film don’t see, filled with moments after conversations, before trips, in the wake of events, in the build up to meetings. It treats mundanity as precious. And it's right to. Cleo herself isn’t concerned with the political implications of her life beyond the extent to which it affects her daily existence. But it’s through this unusual rhetorical device that Cuaron monumentalizes Cleo's life, finding beauty and tragedy in something as simple as folding clothes. The critics who have made blunderous attempts to attack Cuaron over not giving Cleo more ‘impetus' (by which they mean ‘lines'), have lost sight of what empowerment in film means and all the ways in which it can exist. Cleo’s life means more to me as a viewer because I’m afforded the privilege of being present in each of its most extraordinary and extra ordinary moments. This is Cuaron's masterpiece and we're lucky to be able to witness a powerful director realizing his power with such grace and passion.

EveryFilmIWatch is multi-channel film review project run by Sebastian Cox, ScriptUp co-founder. Further reviews can be found on Instagram.