Why Roma deserved the Oscar for Best Picture

Any film about a poor brown woman made by a rich white boy turned rich white man in Mexico should come under scrutiny. It doesn’t matter that acclaimed director Alfonso Cuarón — whose credits include Y Tu Mamá También and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — managed to do a meticulously sensitive job navigating those racial and socioeconomic briars. He was always going to — and did — receive fire. But the line between productive scrutiny and cheap shots for the sake of performative wokeness can be nauseatingly blurry. Roma provoked a tsunami of the latter.

Almost all of the woke internet’s criticisms of Roma appear in film critic, Richard Brody’s takedown, “There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” for The New Yorker. The Netflix-distributed film centres on Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), an indigenous domestic worker looking after a family of four children in Mexico City’s Roma district, in the 1970s (inspired by the director’s own childhood). You guessed it. The voice missing is hers. Brody, coming to Cleo’s rescue, accuses Cuarón of reducing her to a trope “all too common” in movies by “upper-middle-class and intellectual filmmakers about working people: a strong, silent, long-enduring, and all-tolerating type, deprived of discourse, a silent angel whose inability or unwillingness to express herself is held up as a mark of her stoic virtue.” Brody complains that the protagonist doesn’t appear to have “political sympathies, inclinations, or ideologies.” He refers to her character as “devoid of any wider consciousness beyond her immediate well-being.”

Yep. Poor, powerless, marginalised people’s consciousness are often largely dominated by their immediate well-being because they live in survival mode. Cleo’s up first and in bed last, doing manual labour all day, almost every day. Of course she is strong. She is silent, because her job and her survival are on the line. That’s the point and central tragedy of the film: Cleo had no voice. Even the mother of the family (Marina de Tavira), also a victim, has the power of words and narrative. She re-tells her own story. The end of the film is a new beginning for her. Cleo, on the other hand, ends up right back where she started: making a smoothie. In her position, to be long-enduring and all-tolerating may have been her only path to dignity. And even so, she breaks down on-screen multiple times.

Not that poor, marginalised people don’t ever have broad political consciousness. Of course, they do. But sometimes upper-middle-class and intellectual film critics don’t. The New Yorker’s Brody says Cuarón “fails to imagine who the character of Cleo is.” But it’s the critic who fails to imagine what Cleo’s life is like, despite that the film portrays it in heartbreaking scene after heartbreaking scene of vivid humiliation.

Brody also criticises the film for a lack of political depth in general. He says, Roma “doesn’t make clear whether [Mexico] was actually democratic” at the time, despite that white people confiscating indigenous land is a running theme throughout the film and that protestors are massacred. Of that scene, Brody asks “What are the students protesting? What are they advocating? Why do they seem to threaten the regime?” Another New Yorker critic, Anthony Lane, makes a similar point: “Cuarón makes no attempt to explain it, and nothing is more telling than the sight of Cleo glassed off from the scenes of revolt, as if they were beyond her comprehension.”

But the movie is not about the protest, or Mexico’s democracy. It is about Cleo. And, most likely, she did not know what the protests were about or why they threatened the regime. Being indigenous does not mean she had to be political. And anyway, is a drama not allowed to just sprinkle in a little political context? Or better yet, recreate the surreal immediacy of that political context, without invoking a larger discourse? Portraying a limited perspective can become a political argument in itself.

Besides Brody and Lane, woke critics all over the internet made arbitrary demands on Roma and its alleged political aspirations — or lack thereof. But just because Cleo is indigenous does not mean that the film must be about her political struggle. Insisting that it does — and failing to observe the ways in which it already is — amounts to icky, guilt-informed othering. This is not productive scrutiny, but a myopic race to publicly bash something to collect the woke tokens that pop out of it (for storage in one’s own social capital piggy bank). This is why we still have a Grammy category called “World Music,” and why a foreign language film has never won Best Picture: precisely because broad political consciousness is a privilege — one that the US has yet to earn.

But hey, can we blame the critics — or anyone — for wanting to rescue Cleo? No way. Watching Roma makes it impossible not to. That’s a testament to the film’s success, not its failure.