[Rattan Gujadhur] Alfonso Cuaron’s ROMA - a short review

The triumph was more than complete. In 2018, when Alfonso decided to test his mettle in black and white, against the giants of Hollywood, it became the stuff of legends. Cuaron’s Roma has since changed the face of movie liturgy.

Aparicio’s as the servant girl Cleo is, Mexico ! The country that has provided for millennia, but remains, and remained, plundered by one and all, from colonial masters to corrupted crooks. She is the symbol of aborted revolutions, and the foundation of great Art.

I understand Cuaron’s humanism, we started feeling at the beginning of this movie, that this was not just another anti-colonial flick, but no, it would rise into a legendary ode to native Indians, and beyond that, to du grand art symbolism of the beauty of feminine energy, of the nobility of the mother country.

In one brush stroke Cuaron makes of Cleo, the servant girl, the great universal Kali, ever renewed, ever present. The still birth of her child follows the failed bloody student revolutions of the 70’s, and her triumph in saving the kids of her mistress, is shakti incarnate transcending race, class, man, woman. She is humanity. Cuaron’s Roma will remain for ever grafted in our hearts. There is just nothing like it. 

Despite a revolution, death, divorce, genocide Cuaron’s message is: humanism is forever Avinashi (eternal) 

A propos de l'auteur : Rattan Gujadhur     left Mauritius for higher studies in the US in 1999. He has practiced in the Pharma and Biotech world for over 29 years and is a Dr in Chemistry. He remains deeply in love with Mauritius and has published reminiscences of Mauritius via a poetry collection and a novel.