In the weeks following its release on Netflix, the critical reception of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) crystallized around a negative review published in The New Yorker by Richard Brody.[1] The review’s main thesis was announced in its title: “There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma.’” Brody objected to the film’s depiction of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), the domestic servant at the center of the film. The character of Cleo was based on Cuarón’s own live-in nanny, Libo Rodriguez, who cared for Cuarón and his siblings in a middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City in the 1960s and early 1970s. “Watching ‘Roma,’” Brody complains, “one awaits…illuminating details about Cleo’s life outside her employer’s family…and [outside] a generously forthcoming and personal relationship between Cleo and the children in her care.”[2] Brody continues, “There is nothing of this sort in the movie; Cleo hardly speaks more than a sentence or two at a time and says nothing at all about life in her village, her childhood, her family.... Cleo remains a cipher; her interests and experiences—her inner life—remain inaccessible to Cuarón. He not only fails to imagine who the character of Cleo is but fails to include the specifics of who Libo was for him when he was a child.”[3] For Brody, Cuarón’s failure to individualize and contextualize has deprived Cleo of a voice; her character is just another example of the hagiographic mode favored by well-intentioned “upper-middle-class and intellectual filmmakers” when they turn their attention to the working poor.[4] Cuarón, in other words, has made the mistake of trying to represent the “Other” and, moreover, he has rendered her as no more individuated than a stereotype. This kind of criticism is familiar enough. The subaltern must speak—preferably for herself, and in her own voice.

When Brody says there is a voice missing in Roma, he is playing on two senses of voice. There is the fact that Cleo has only a few lines of dialogue: she literally does not say much. But there is also a more metaphoric sense of “filmic voice,” what scholars call narrative point of view—an “intangible, moiré-like pattern formed by the unique interaction of all a film’s codes.”[5] For Brody, and for others, Cleo’s point of view has not been incorporated into the film’s narrative point of view.

One of the elementary lessons of film analysis is that one must be careful not to collapse these two senses of voice; it is possible (and not uncommon) for a film’s narration to undermine, rather than amplify, a particular character’s explicit speech. (Think of Citizen Kane, where it is clear that the film’s narration—its filmic voice—comments critically, through a complex flashback structure, on the character of Kane.) But it is perhaps more frequently the case that filmic voice coincides with the perspective of a particular character. The implication of Brody’s title is that Cleo’s literal silence is a symptom of (and a contributor to) a filmic voice that is not only not hers, but also largely indifferent to her point of view.

But what would the film be like if Cleo’s point of view were not missing from Roma’s filmic voice? What would make Cleo seem like a person and not a cipher? This, of course, brings us to the specific formal problems of rendering character subjectivity on film. But notice that built into Brody’s account is an implicit view of what makes a person seem like a person and not a stereotype: some combination of a past (e.g., information about her “life in her village, her childhood, her family”), a voice (e.g., “more than a sentence or two at a time,”), signs of inner life (e.g.,“her interests and experiences”), leisure time that is actually free and in which one can be seen to make autonomous decisions (e.g., “illuminating details about Cleo’s life outside her employers family”). Translated into the terms of film form, we might say that Brody takes issue with the film’s narrative, which eschews details about Cleo’s past and family; with the script, which gives Cleo few lines of dialogue; with the lack of a voice-over narration or flashbacks or memory images; with the casting and/or direction of the main actor, which has opted for inscrutability. We might add that those filmic techniques often used to suggest character subjectivity—eyeline matches, optical point of view shots, sound perspective, close-up reaction shots, shot-reverse-shot structures—are also largely absent from the film.

Brody’s review was met with indignation. Commentators have taken issue with Brody’s suggestion that the film is not attuned to Cleo’s point of view; after all, she “appears in almost every scene, far more often than Paco, the son who appears to be a fictionalization of Cuarón’s younger self,” as Caleb Crain suggests in The New York Review of Books.[6] Many critics have claimed that Cleo does speak, for example, in the scene after the fire when she mentions the smells and landscapes of her village. Some have tried to cleave apart the two senses of voice—maybe she does not say much, but as one film scholar wrote on Twitter, “Probably Hollywood has trained film critics to expect feisty, picturesque, salmahayesque maids to the point that Godard experts can’t see words in silence, and deal with reflexive, stoic portrayals. Cleo has so much voice…if we could only listen.”[7] In this vein, critics have praised Aparicio’s performance, detailing all the ways her restrained, quiet acting style has communicated reservoirs of deep feeling, etc. Michael Wood, writing in the London Review of Books, says “Yalitza Aparicio underacts so wonderfully, does so little with words, that we almost always know what her character is feeling: when she is contented, entertained, worried, frightened.”[8] Dolores Tierney has protested against the stubborn coloniality of “Northern-based, generally (but not always) white/Anglo male film critics” that don’t understand that they don’t understand what they are looking at.[9] As one of Brody’s Twitter detractors put it, summing up a definite thread in the complaints: “What am I saying? I guess the following: this is a cantankerous review written by a gringo.”

What is striking about the criticisms that have been made of Brody’s review is that they largely mirror his own concerns.[10] Like Brody, they are critical of the arrogance of speaking for (an)other that enjoys less power than the speaker. Above all, the subaltern must speak. What is taken for granted is that to represent domestic service appropriately—progressively—one must “give voice” to the domestic by giving density and expressiveness to her character. It is not enough for Cleo to be restored to the frame, so to speak; her inner life must be revealed. Thus what the commentators disagree about is whether Cuarón has succeeded in “giving voice” despite Cleo’s silence. For most, an intentional, calculated refusal of Cleo’s interiority would indeed be troublesome politically.

We can, then, recast Brody’s own criticisms of the film. His concern is not that Roma has tried to represent Cleo’s subjectivity and failed to be convincing (that is one kind of error), but that it failed so much as to even try. For Brody, the fact that the film does not explore Cleo’s subjectivity does not reflect a deliberate choice made by Cuarón; rather, it reflects a blind spot on his part—a blind spot typical of “upper-middle-class and intellectual filmmakers” who attempt to represent the working poor. Moreover, what Brody wishes for is that an authentic, politically-engaged cinema would resolve the ills of the world in representation. If the figure of the servant has been treated in life (and in older representations) as a “non-person,” as Erving Goffman has written, then her personhood must be restored in representation in order to re-animate her.[11]

Brody is not alone in his wish for a kind of solutionism on screen. Roma is part of a cycle of more than 25 Latin American art films about domestic service produced over the last twenty years. Many of the films within this cycle are well-intentioned advocacy films that try to recuperate the figure of the domestic by giving her “voice,” in Brody’s two senses. Some feature interviews with domestics in which they describe their lives (e.g., Paulina [Vicki Funari, Mexico/Canada/United States, 1998], Empleadas y patrones [Abner Benaim, Panama/Argentina, 2010], Doméstica [Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil, 2012]). Others explore the domain of leisure time (e.g., Domésticas [Fernando Meirelles, Nando Olival, Brazil, 2001], La novia del desierto [Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato, Argentina/Chile, 2017]). Still others embrace consumer agency, showing the maids regain their “freedom” when they act as consumer citizens, making lifestyle choices through their spending patterns in films like La Nana (Sebastián Silva, Chile/Mexico, 2009), Cama-adentro (Jorge Gaggero, Argentina/Spain, 2004], and Play (Alicia Scherson, Chile, 2005).
 

But this is not the only strategy, even for politically oriented filmmakers. Indeed, the great majority of the films in this cycle—and Roma is just the one that has garnered the most attention—suggest a more controversial understanding of domestic service as an institution that compromises the self on the job, that blocks a certain kind of voicing, that gnarls those that earn their living from it. These are films like Santiago (João Moreira Salles, Brazil, 2007), Parque vía (Enrique Rivero, Mexico, 2008), or Batalla en el cielo (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2005) that catalogue the way the institution wreaks havoc on the personalities of its maid-victims, the way it ruins them—not just the trajectory of their lives, but their selves. These diagnostic films have to navigate tricky terrain. If the democratic ideal embraces “giving voice,” the institution of domestic service—in these films—renders that ideal unstable. Thus, to “give voice” in representation would be to falsify the nature of the institution of domestic service. So, far from being a symptom of Cuarón’s blind spot, Cleo’s inscrutability, her silence, might be read as a calculated choice in the service of a different kind of intervention in politically fraught terrain. This is the line of thought that I want to explore in this essay.

In what follows I will situate Roma within the cycle of Latin American domestic service films before I concentrate on the question of voicing and point of view as a formal as well as political problem in the film. I will try to show that a consideration of the operations of point of view in the film shed new light on both Cuarón’s project, but also on what I consider to be the crux of the matter across this cycle of films—namely, the emotional entanglement of the domestic herself.

​

The Domestic Service Film Cycle

One of the difficulties that critics have had in thinking about Roma is only passing familiarity with its generic context.[12] This cycle of films is concerned with paid domestic service as an institution. In this respect, these films differ from a previous generation of Latin American popular culture featuring maids; those works were often characterized by interclass romances and allegorical fictions.[13] Unlike the film and media of the past, the domestic workers of this recent cycle are not involved in so-called “foundational fictions,” stitching the nation together through the mechanism of marriage plots between brown maids and their white employers. Nor are they popular melodramas featuring saintly domestics whose virtue goes unrecognized by malevolent mistresses. Films in the contemporary cycle eschew moralistic frameworks. They often feature relatively liberal, warm, well-intentioned employers. The interest of these films is not in their treatment of the politics of exploitation, but rather, in what has been called the “affects of domination”—that is, the affective dimensions of unequal intimate relationships.[14]
 

Even before Roma, the international critical reception of these films has been very positive, and critics have not hesitated to compare them to their European art film counterparts from a previous generation.[15] Reviews are replete with references to Buñuel, Chabrol, Losey. Scott Foundas, writing in The Village Voice, symptomatically observes that La nana (Sebastián Silva, 2008) is “The Remains of the Day as reimagined by a budding Luis Buñuel.”[16]

But this assessment of the cycle does not seem quite right. The paradigmatic European art films about domestic service—Joseph Losey’s The Servant (U.K., 1963), Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (France/Italy, 1964), Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (France/Germany, 1995), and so on—are absorbed by the sadism of the master-servant relationship. There is no glimmer of affection or reciprocity or genuine intimacy; there is only putrefaction, deception, mutual destruction. The servants may be depraved—twisted by this servitude—but they do not suffer from a lack of class-consciousness; they understand very well the realities of the master-servant power dynamic. By contrast, the Latin American films in this archive are interested in a rarely-noted paradox of domestic service: that such an exploitative form of work can produce such a fierce identification of the servant with the employer.[17]

This recent interest in paid domestic service among Latin America’s most accomplished auteurs may be due to a historical phenomenon. In the last few decades, the institution of domestic service has changed in Latin America. It is not that it has become less common. People are still hiring others to clean, cook, nanny, chauffeur, garden, etc. Recently, in 2010, paid domestic service constituted about 5.5% of total urban employment in Latin America, down only .5% from the 1990s. In Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Panama it was recently estimated that between 15% and 18% of working women are employed in domestic service; in Uruguay and Paraguay, 20%.[18] Yet if the amount of domestic service has not changed much since the 1990s, its character as labor has.

Traditionally, domestic service was distinguished from other forms of labor by four main characteristics. First, the servant lived in the master’s home. Her privacy and thereby her personal freedom were delimited by the arrangement. Second, the number of hours she worked was often unspecified; she was, in some sense, always on duty. Third, the tasks of most servants were non-specific—they included a variety of jobs from cleaning to cooking to taking care of children.[19] Fourth, the servant would spend a lifetime working for one family; and often her children would become servants to the next generation.

The traditional master-servant relationship—in general and in Latin America, in particular—has long been understood as a “premodern relationship,” a species of pre-capitalist, colonial patron-client relationship.[20] It is for this reason as well that early scholarship on the subject predicted that domestic service would become obsolete as capitalism “matured.”[21] Indeed, traditional paid domestic service presented a paradox. While the occupation is old in human history (i.e., it predates a capitalist mode of production), its dramatic expansion (and feminization)— which has taken place at different times in different places—is relatively new. In most places, it was an indirect consequence of early modernization and industrialization, which introduced a “modern” social inequality that often manifested an equilibrium of labor supply and demand at the bottom and at the top of the income scale.[22] Although it first rose to numerical prominence with industrialization, the character of domestic service retained the stamp of an earlier historical moment. As a phenomenon, a shroud of anachronism has long accompanied it.
 

The traditional, “premodern” domestic service labor arrangement held in Latin America until relatively recently.[23] The terms of the transformation of servanthood in Latin American would be familiar to anyone paying attention to the broader transformations of work. Servanthood is being contractualized as it gets absorbed by capitalist labor relations and as the state has been pressured to formalize employment in this sector.[24] In practical terms, this means that maids are now increasingly living-out; employment agencies are cropping up to mediate between private households and potential employees; the occupation is becoming more short-term and intermittent; servants work for several families rather than exclusively for one; domestics change jobs more frequently; and tasks are more sharply defined as a stricter division of labor takes hold.

With contractualization comes a transformation in the character of the personal relationship between domestics and their employers. Before, the paternalist character of servanthood, which included intimacy and identification, supported the buttressing ideological fiction that the maid is “a member of the family” or “like a daughter.”[25] Increasingly, that ideological fiction is becoming untenable as domestic workers are becoming more like regular employees. The traditional material inducements for acceding to that paternalist labor arrangement—i.e., the relative security of servant employment—likewise have become precarious.[26]

From the point of view of organized Latin American domestic workers—whose unions and employment agencies are having success in pressuring states and employers to formalize, regularize and contractualize a form of work that often depended on the good will of employers—the shift in the character of domestic service, which has mitigated the personalism of the job, has also generally been considered a happy and hard-fought development.[27]

These changes have been received more ambivalently by Latin American filmmakers interested in the nature of domestic service. In the face of this historical rupture, the films of the domestic service cycle express a certain, to be sure “politically incorrect,” tension: on the one hand, they are conscious of the politically problematic character of traditional domestic service; on the other hand, they are nostalgic for the cross-class intimacy between masters and servants that traditional domestic service made possible. Indeed, it is worth noting that for several of the films of the domestic service cycle—documentaries like Santiago, Paulina, Empleadas y Patrones, Doméstica and fiction films like Parque vía, Criada, Batalla en el cielo—the servant role is played by the director’s actual servant (or family servant). Even when that is not the case, the character is often based on a real figure from the director’s life (as is the case with Roma). The directors are mostly in their 30s, 40s, 50s; they were growing up with live-in maids in the 70s, 80s and early 90s—and not coincidentally they were also also growing up in the wake of the collapse of revolutionary political projects across the region. The child had a relationship with his nanny/servant; as an adult, one of his first artistic acts is to eulogize her. The domestics in these films are treated with care and consideration; the representations are—to use the language of stereotype analysis—“positive.”

These filmmakers love their domestics. That is not the issue. But what of the domestic’s love? Like a detective story, several films in this cycle sleuth out signs of love. Incredulous and insecure, they seem to ask, “Does/ Did she love me truly?” Indeed, several of the films in this corpus are centered on the question of the domestic’s affective attachment and the existence of a mutually-felt love between master and servant—despite everything. But for cross-class intimacy to be authentic—for her to love me truly—she must be free; she must be a person, she must have an autonomous identity. And that is the problem.

What seems crucial here is the recognition of a new kind of concern. In an earlier historical moment, the domestic’s feigned affect, her good behavior —not her genuine feelings—was all that counted. But once the domestic’s love, emotion, and authentic feeling matter, so too does her personhood. In revisiting the domestic space in which the authoritarian disposition was first learned, internalized, practiced like a ritual, several of these films are engaged in a kind of imaginative do-over. This time, the films try to summon forth the Other. The object of scrutiny is often the domestic’s personhood—her identity, her inner life. Who is she, after all? Who was she? It is in this context that the question of voice and point of view becomes paramount. Different films use different cinematic techniques to capture the domestic’s point of view. One might reasonably suppose that this interest in the personhood of the servant is part of an effort to make visible what was once invisible, to balance a one-sided representational history. To this extent, these films share Richard Brody’s solutionism, his wish for a representation that restores a sense of the domestic as a fully developed person—with a past, varied experience, a rich inner life.

But amid the whole range of films that engage this dynamic, there are alternative (both formal and political) aesthetic proposals. In some films in the cycle—films similarly attuned to the question of the domestic’s affective attachment—the alternative approach is specifically oriented toward a new treatment of point of view. The films I have in mind embrace, in short, a kind of inscrutability of the domestic worker that is tied to a wider suspicion (one that is also familiar to political cinema) about the demands of representation. Roma is an exemplary and instructive case among these, not least because the polemics surrounding it have brought to the foreground the problem of the domestic’s point of view as a problem of film form.[28]

Roma

The question of point of view comes up repeatedly in the reviews and commentaries on Roma.[29] Defenders of Roma have tried to claim that Cleo is speaking in Roma, just not in words, and that the film communicates her point of view. Carla Marcantonio writes that “Roma is almost entirely structured around Cleo’s point of view and her experiences; this is the central aesthetic and narrative paradigm that drives the film.” She goes on: “I therefore have a hard time accepting the view that it silences Cleo, despite her silent demeanor.”[30] Pedro Ángel Palou affirms, “Everything in the movie is seen through Cleo’s eyes, not those of the family, not even those of Pepe—Cuarón’s alter ego—, and it is her gaze that makes Roma so compelling.”[31] Sergio de la Mora, striking a more ambivalent note, claims that the camera “shifts between objective and subjective points of view…. A number of sequences are shot through her point of view in a film with few subjective shots. It is never a question of who is mostly doing the looking and telling: it is Cuarón, looking back in time, remembering.”[32] But this quickly gets into deep water. Is the film shot from Cleo’s point of view? Or from Cuarón’s? Is a film being shot from someone’s point of view to be understood as the same as a film structured around someone’s experience? How can a film be shot from a character’s point of view without subjective shots?
 

I think these ambiguous and contradictory ways of talking about point of view suggest that there is something confusing about the basic conceit of Roma itself. The confusion has to do with the way Cleo’s visibility—her ubiquitous presence in the frame—is combined with the opacity of her character.[33] It seems clear that Cleo is the subject of Roma; she is present in almost every shot, and in some sense, she serves to anchor us within the world of the film. But, despite this centrality, there are very few shots that mimic her visual perception.[34] This eschewal of the point of view shot is amplified by the way the film goes to some lengths to refuse a familiar kind of formal structure that confers the authority of point of view (even if it does not mimic optical or sonic perception): the eyeline match. We see characters, especially Cleo, look in a direction—at something—but these shots are not followed by the reverse shot that would reveal what they are looking at. There are places in the film where one might expect to see reaction shots or a shot/reverse shot structure—but the film has scrupulously avoided them. For example, when Cleo first visits the obstetrician, Dr. Margarita Velez (Zarela Lizbeth Chinolla Arellano), the camera is trained on Cleo for 53 seconds as she answers the doctor’s off-screen questions about her sexual history. Yet, there is not a single shot of the doctor. Or, when Cleo’s baby is delivered dead, the camera position remains fixed (in a medium shot), perpendicular to the prone Cleo: there are no eyeline matches to what the obstetrician or pediatrician see and no optical point of view shots from Cleo’s perspective.[35] The camera’s mode—especially when Cleo appears in long shot—is largely distant, observational, omniscient. In a certain sense, I think the camera is surveillant.

Thomas Y. Levin coined the term “surveillant narration” to refer to the anxiety-inducing, unsettling quality—the “panoptic undecidability”—generated by “unusually long and static shots seemingly lacking in any diegetically attributable point of view,” shots that lack the “eventhood” that the spectator has come to expect from long duration shots.[36] Levin aims to distinguish “surveillant narration” from what he calls classic “ciné-surveillance,” which often signals its genesis in surveillance technology within the diegesis through the use of grainy, black and white footage associated with videotape; high-angles and fish-eye perspective; the “mechanical back-and-forth pan of the CCTV frame”; and/or the use of multiple screens.[37] Because “surveillant narration” is broader, more encompassing, and more undecidable than ciné-surveillance, its boundaries with omniscient narration can be fuzzy. For my purposes here, it is relevant that Levin traces “surveillant narration” back to its ur-instance in the 1895 Lumière films of workers leaving the Lumière factory, in which we have “the gaze of the boss/owner observing his workers as they leave the factory.”[38] Indeed, he argues that “employee surveillance plays a key role in the very birth of the medium.”[39]
 

The approximately five-minute opening shot of Roma may at first seem to belong to this tradition of surveillant narration. As the camera tilts up from a close bird’s eye view of a porte-cochère’s stone floor tiles, it reveals, at quite a distance, the lone domestic, Cleo, coiling up the hose, collecting the bucket and mop, and making her way toward the back end of the porte-cochère. The stationary camera pans 180 degrees, following Cleo as she walks toward it, passes it, and heads to the bathroom off the courtyard before entering the house. The camera’s angle is straight; its height neither high nor low; its location appears to be in the middle of the patio (i.e., there are no signs of a voyeuristic camera, concealed from Cleo’s view). This is certainly not a case of ciné-surveillance; and yet, the shot feels not only unsettling but surveillant. When Cleo enters the bathroom, the shot might have been over with the action—after all, the camera has been following Cleo’s actions and Cleo had just finished cleaning the driveway and courtyard and left the image. But, instead, the camera—stationary and distant—remains trained on the closed door through which she passed for another 30 seconds, waiting for her to emerge; the “eventhood” of the shot suddenly is cast into doubt. (Figure 1)