Reviews

Many reviewers found that the rough life of nomads in the US has been idealised and that the movie does not really show the daily hardships they endure. I agree. But the movie is about something else. The main character, the great Frances McDormand, is not happy but it is resilient. She is not a good person in particular but can be kind and warm to others and kind and warm to herself. She lives her life unfazed by the hardships she has to endure and that have sucked most of the vitality or feelings out of her. She is not capable to settle down, not capable to fall in love, not capable to make friends or laugh or have a good time. As if ever since her husband died and the town that she lived in disbanded her soul has been taken away as well.

The movie ends with her visiting her former town and finding her empty home. It looks less hospitable than her tiny van, where she spends all her life. But the empty house might be also a metaphor for her heart, her soul, her body depleted of all energies. Fern- what a lovely name - does not really live as a nomad. She merely lingers the vast American plains, surviving and resisting. The movie is about resilience, is about injustice and hardship. It shows all these in the most wonderful way.

Such a brilliant, brilliant, rich movie. There are times in life when you feel you just lost a few hours. There are also times when you were productive at something and feel good, or times when you were simply entertained and feel good as well. There are also times when you feel so emotionally charged that you just have to stop thinking for a second, take a deep breath and start to dissect and to make sense of the last hours spent. This is how I felt after I saw Roma. I feel I do not have time and energy to unpack the layers and layers of meanings and messages transmitted by the movie.

Let me start by saying the directing was amazing. The image was amazing (and i do not like black and white movies). The screenplay was amazing. The movie shows the life of a maid and through it goes into questions of class, race, family, gender roles, death. I will not detail where all these things appear but just stop at two things I found particularly impressive. Although it was easy for the movie to fall into the more known narrative of the maid being working class, different race, badly treated and thus unprivileged and discriminated, it does much much more than this. The maid is actually well treated, to the extent that it becomes a second mother (or father?) for the children. When the dad is gone, she becomes even more part of the family. In the ocean scene she does arguably what only parents would do, sacrificing her own life. Therefore, we are left wondering if are parents truly the backbone of a family? Must you have blood relations to be called a parent or to have more rights to raise a child? What does 'your' child mean anyway? If you gave birth to it, what rights are you entitled to? Is the servant/maid worse or better parent than the father who is always away, and cheats on his wife?

Another striking thing is the constant presence of death in the movie. One of the children tells about someone who got shot at the beginning of the movie, then another child plays death, the maid says that she likes to be dead when she plays, her child is born dead, in that protest a lot of people are dying. I was ABSOLUTELY SURE that given all these clues, the children will also drown in the ocean scene! But the director brilliantly does not allow this. He twists in a way the whole narrative, to offer us also hope and happiness, that go hand in hand with death anyway. Because Roma is in the end a movie about life, more than it is about death.

The film has all the elements of a typical 'me too' case: the powerless, single mother, the institutionalised culture of sexual harassment, the culture of silence, the powerful males, etc., etc. She believes in herself, fights for her cause and in the end, surprise!, she wins :) Therefore, the narrative is just plain, plain, plain, The best thing about the movie is the 'italieness' in it. It definitely has a certain Italian charm and it is refreshing to see a 'me too' case happening not in the USA.