Roma: Alfonso Cuarón has developed into an able craftsman but does not have anything of significance to say

What critics respond to most is the look of a film and it is only in its ‘look’ that Roma comes up trumps; still, the look of a film is not something it is long remembered by. The film is episodic and the key events involve a visit to a friend’s hacienda for the new year, street violence and massacre of peacefully protesting students by right-wing goons, Cleo trying to meet Fermin but being rebuffed, the birth of Cleo’s child, which is dead, Sophia and the family vacating the house briefly for her husband Antonio to take away his possessions, and a concluding sequence on a beach when Cleo saves one of the children from drowning. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that the film is full of signs that ‘indicate that the image of Cleo’s goodness is itself a trap, the object of implicit critique which denounces her dedication as the result of her ideological blindness;’ still, not only is there no trace of irony in Cleo’s portrayal but Sophia doing her best to help Cleo when she is pregnant and staying by her hardly supports Žižek’s reading. A filmmaker widely associated with autobiographical films is Federico Fellini – whose film Roma Cuarón is perhaps invoking – but they were made when Fellini was already an acknowledged master. Roma belongs to a category quite different, which can be called the ‘global art film’ that gets shown at international film festivals to roaming critics primarily producing publicity; the same critics move from festival to festival consuming the latest films and most of the younger ones are even ignorant of film history.