Roma · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Soapy water slides across a tiled courtyard, back and forth, back and forth. In it, a rectangle of sky. An airplane crosses — tiny, silver, gone. We have not met anyone yet. The camera is looking down at wet stone, and it is in no hurry to find a face. This is how Alfonso Cuarón teaches you to watch Roma before he tells you a single thing about the people in it: the world comes first, and we arrive inside it late.

Deleuze had a name for what that opening does. Long before there is a hero organizing the frame, he says, there is only matter and light — images relating to other images, a world that films itself with no one at the center. He calls it the plane of immanence, an acentered, almost non-human vision. Most movies bury this under a protagonist immediately: we see because she sees. Cuarón refuses. His camera moves on a motion-control dolly at its own tempo, panning away from Cleo mid-gesture, arriving late to her crises, indifferent to where she stands. That indifference is not coldness. It is a philosophical claim — the household is not arranged around any one consciousness — and it is the whole film in one puddle.

Once you feel that, you can feel the larger shift the film is making. Deleuze splits cinema in two. In the older kind — the movement-image — a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; perception feeds action, action resolves the situation, the cut serves the chain. In the newer kind — the time-image — action stops resolving anything, and someone is left simply to look and endure. Deleuze calls that person the seer, the voyant, and calls what she is trapped inside a pure optical and sound situation: a moment too large, too strange, or too fixed to be answered with a deed. Cleo is a seer in exactly this sense. She witnesses a forest fire while a costumed man sings; she watches the man she loves point a martial-arts stick at her and vanish; she watches, through a window, students being gunned down in the street. The film does give her one great action — wading into surf she cannot swim through to pull the children out — but notice how rare and how physically desperate that is. The rule of Roma is watching. The exception is doing, and it nearly kills her.

This is why the film holds shots past the point a normal edit would cut. Deleuze's word is temps mort — dead time, the stretch where the story has finished happening but the image keeps breathing. Cuarón and editor Adam Gough stay on faces and rooms after the event concludes. The stillbirth is not softened by a cut to someone reacting; the camera stays, and the staying is the grief. So too the furniture store during the Halconazo massacre: Cleo spots Fermín among the killers as her labor begins, and the frame will not choose between the two catastrophes. This is Bazin's old faith — that a single deep-focus take, uncut, respects reality's density in a way montage cannot — pushed until private and historical disaster share one unbroken plane. That refusal to separate them is the film's central formal argument.

And Cleo's body carries it. Deleuze speaks of a cinema of the body, where an everyday posture — bending, scrubbing, climbing stairs with a basket — holds duration and exposes a social relation better than any speech. He calls such a posture a gest. Yalitza Aparicio, a schoolteacher who had never acted, gives Cleo almost no dialogue; she gives her attitudes. The way she folds laundry on a rooftop while planes drone overhead tells you her place in the house and in the country more precisely than a monologue could. Here Roma pays an open debt: to De Sica holding on a servant's small routines in Umberto D., and above all to Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, which insisted that a woman's kitchen labor, filmed in real time without music or close-up rescue, was worthy subject and not narrative filler. Cuarón inherits that ethic wholesale and adds Figueroa's high-contrast Mexican deep focus, Hou's figures held at middle distance, Tarkovsky's memory laid over the present like a second exposure.

There is one more turn, and it is the ethical one. This is Cuarón's memory of his own nanny, Libo — yet the camera fuses his adult retrospection with Cleo's vision until you cannot cleanly separate whose film it is. Deleuze calls that fusion free indirect discourse: the author sees through the character without stealing her over. And because Cleo is an indigenous domestic worker rendered with full interiority yet never made a symbol, the film keeps faith with what Deleuze called a people who are missing — the political entering precisely through those the frame usually leaves at the edge. Cuarón does not pretend to close the racial and economic distance between the boy who remembers and the woman who raised him. He films the distance.

What did this do to film as an art? It took the slow durational memory film — a festival mode — financed it with technology money, shot it himself in monochrome on a 65mm-sensor camera, and blew Cleo's small figure up to IMAX scale on a global streaming platform. The scandal over whether a Netflix film could win the Golden Lion was really an argument about whether patience still had a place. Roma answered by making a puddle feel cosmic. Watch it again and start with the water. Everything is already there.