Brianna Riddle

            Popular culture has celebrated modern cinema for its focus on the depiction of “strong female characters”: a vague label used to describe women in film who are characterized as powerful, physically strong, or assertive. Labeling women who exhibit these traits as “strong female characters” generates praise for these portrayals of women, but that strength is conflated with masculinity, and therefore the women characterized as “strong” in film are only recognized as such for embodying a male-focused definition of strength. Alyssa Kaufman calls this phenomenon the “Athena Effect,” in which female characters utilize this construct of masculinity to perform strength in a culture that “value[s] masculinity and support[s] it as the only avenue for power” (1). Other authors and scholars agree that these women are restrained to a masculine mold with “an absence of vulnerability” and other stereotypically feminine characteristics that have been prohibited in “strong female characters” (Dowling 24).

            In this essay, I will evaluate the extent to which writer and director Alfonso Cuarón and his female characters subvert this masculine ideal of strength through alternative depictions of strong women in his 2018 film Roma. I argue that Cuarón recontextualizes the schema of strength and endows his female characters with alternative virtues of vulnerability, tenacity, and fortitude, crafting a new, feminized representation of female strength in film. While Cuarón is not the first filmmaker to provide an alternative depiction of female strength, his work in Roma has created an alternative depiction of strong female characters based on the endurance of domestic housekeepers in 1970s Mexican culture. Rather than create female characters that possess traditionally masculine traits to conform to cinematic tropes, Cuarón models female characters in Roma on the women of his childhood, which allows him to provide realistic representations of strong women that closely resemble his own female role models.

            Current scholarly conversation about Roma mainly focuses on the political and historical context of the film. Set in 1971, Roma depicts the life of a domestic housekeeper in Mexico City, with the backdrop of the Corpus Christie Massacre and student-led rebellions across Mexico (Marcantonio 39). Cleo (Yalitza Aparacio), the housekeeper, and Sofía (Marina de Tavira)—the matriarch of the family that Cleo cares for—are both dominant female protagonists in a film that lacks present, influential male characters. Despite the implications and significance of a female-led household in 1970s Mexico, which was a rarity at the time, most scholars fail to focus on this aspect of the film; some even characterize the discussion of female protagonists as “so overly emphasized in media coverage” (Marcantonio 40). In this essay, add another dimension to the academic conversation surrounding Roma—drawing on the sparse references to gender relations in the film that are currently found in scholarly analysis—and establish the significance of Cuarón’s new concept of strong female characters.  

            Roma follows the script of Cuarón’s own childhood, with the protagonist, Cleo, based on Cuarón’s “adored real-life nanny” Libo, who cared for Cuarón as a child. In a 2019 interview with Cuarón, Devin Gordon describes the impact that a female-led household had on Cuarón’s relationship to women and the way that they are portrayed in Roma:

Coursing through all of Cuarón’s films . . . is a sense that the artist who made them loves, even worships, women but is not too sure about men. . . . His father left when he was 9 years old. . . . This was the one constant: “Women taking charge in raising families. And an absence of men.”

Cuarón’s interest in depicting the story of Libo—through the fictional character of Cleo—is to him, “almost like owing an explanation” to Libo, and the need to confront “the truth of his upbringing, his entitlement” (Gordon). Gordon also explores the limited role of Cuarón as a child in Roma, as it is not clear which of the children is modeled after Cuarón. On that topic, Amelie Hastie argues in her analysis of the film that Roma is a love letter to Cleo, noting—similarly to Gordon—that the attention Roma pays to Cleo’s life rather than Cuarón’s is the director’s “gesture of love for Cleo and for Libo” (Hastie 57). Cuarón takes special care to illustrate the love and compassion that Libo bestowed on his family when he was a child and focuses on what made Libo’s life (through Cleo) a significant story to be told and what made her a noteworthy woman outside of her relationship to the family she cares for.

            Following this pattern of Cuarón’s childhood influences, Roma’s male characters are rarely present, and their infrequent appearances are earmarked with sensationalized and occasionally violent performances of masculinity. In the first scene of the film, we are introduced to Antonio—Sofía’s husband and the supposed patriarch of the family—as he painstakingly inches his comically large Ford Galaxie into “a garage far too narrow for its girth” (Gordon). Cleo’s boyfriend Fermín, the only other significant male character in the film, is present for 4 scenes of the film. In his first, we witness a forceful, naked martial-arts demonstration full of “self-assured machismo”; his final two appearances both center on his threats to Cleo’s life and her unborn baby (Gordon). Marcantonio claims that Roma “speaks volume not just about matriarchy…but also about patriarchy”; to discuss the women of the film without first understanding Roma’s condemnation of men would inhibit understanding of Cuarón’s development and characterization of these female characters. Whether or not Cuarón agrees that “absent and violent patriarchies are to blame for the disintegration of the nuclear family,” as Marcantonio alleges, the absent men of Cuarón’s childhood are reflected in the film, and thus Roma illustrates the reverence Cuarón feels towards the women that raised him (40).

            Cleo is the clearest representation of Cuarón’s model of feminized strength; by characterizing her as both vulnerable and enduring, he proves that the two are not mutually exclusive in cinematic representations of strong women. Cleo carries a baby that is eventually stillborn while caring for a family that is not her own and lives as somewhat of an outsider in the world of Sofía and Antonio’s family. In the conclusion of the film, Cleo saves two of the children from drowning in the ocean; not knowing how to swim, Cleo instead wades into the violent waves to save the two children. She is steadfast, each wave representing the loss she has faced, yet still fights unflinchingly to save the children she views as partly her own. There is no show of strength in the scene but of fortitude—here, Cuarón argues that the latter is more significant. Once safely returned to the beach, Cleo breaks down and admits that she never wanted the baby that she had lost earlier in the film; this vulnerability is never condemned, only celebrated. She wraps her arms around the family and momentarily “eclipses Sofía” as the matriarch, drawing on the love between herself and the children: “bodies melding into one another, both collapsing and holding each other up…the tangled, boundary defying nature of such affective bonds” (Marcantonio 43). Cleo’s point of greatest strength is when she falls into the vulnerability of loss—and becomes a better caretaker and more resilient person for it.

            While Cuarón is not necessarily unique in providing portraits of strong women as emotionally enduring, the value in his depiction of female characters is also based in his refusal to shy away from gentle, traditionally feminine traits in his films. We see Fermín perform a menacing, nude martial arts routine to Cleo, contrasting “in her slip, lying modestly under the covers” (Gordon)—her prudency is portrayed by Cuarón as endearing rather than inferior. Cleo is gentle with the children: she sings to them, “her fingers running gently along the child’s back” (Hastie 57). Even as Cleo gives birth to her stillborn baby in one of her most vulnerable moments of the film, Cuarón and the camera force all eyes onto the protagonist, never fearing to show Cleo as a sensitive, suffering woman. In effect, Cuarón creates a well-rounded female character in Cleo, with multiple innovative characterizations to portray Cleo as a strong woman outside of typical, male-fixed ideals of strength.

            One of the central aspects of Roma that is discussed in much scholarly analysis of the film is its portrayal of domestic workers—specifically the integral role they play in Mexican households of the 1970s—which sets the stage for Cuarón’s implications about strong women in film. Scholars are divided on the issue, with differing perspectives on the relationship between Mexican domestic workers and the families they care for. Carla Marcantonio contends that the relationship children and the workers who take care of them are significant and real. She admits that “structures of oppression are in place,” but claims that “they are enduring…because they are enabled by real, emotional ties that exceed and complicate them” (Marcantonio 43). Marcantonio further argues that Cleo continues to care for Sofía and Antonio’s family through hardship because of the relationship she has with the children. Other scholars, however, highlight the fact that these domestic jobs are rooted in slavery and institutions formed centuries ago in Mexico, and as such, relationships between families and their domestic workers will never be equal. This viewpoint is articulated by Gabrielle O’Brien in “Remembrance as Reconstruction: Excavating Memory in Roma,” where she claims that for Cleo, “every interaction with the family is transactional,” citing scenes where Cleo seems to be enjoying the company of the family but is then “sent back to the kitchen to bring them more food or drinks” (11). In Roma, Cuarón illustrates the distance between domestic workers and the families they care for, perhaps as a result of the history of racism that created the institution or due to the nature of the relationship: it is, after all, just a job and not a life. Cleo will never truly be a member of the family she cares for, no matter how emotionally tied she is to the children or Sofía. The beauty in Cuarón’s most nuanced choices lies in his acknowledgement of this distance. By confronting the reality of his childhood privilege and the complicated relationship he had with Libo, Cuarón is able to depict Cleo’s world outside of her relationship to his family—her own life. This choice allows Cuarón to instead focus on Cleo’s ability to withstand this gap as well as the attributes that make Cleo who she is as a woman, and not just as a domestic worker.

            Despite Cleo’s significantly lower social status as compared to Sofía, the two both endure their fair share of challenges at the hands of the men in their lives. O’Brien notes that “both Cleo and Sofía occupy uncertain ground as a result of their gender” regardless of their social class and race and reflects on the similarities between the two: both women are abandoned by their partners. Even though Sofía begins the film within the idealized nuclear family, she too loses the support and love of the man in her life and must take on this role. Explaining to her children late in the film that their father has left and will not be returning, Sofía becomes the single matriarch of her family—left to cope with Antonio’s absence, much as Cleo must deal with her pregnancy and loss alone. The suffering that the real-life counterparts of each woman have undergone was an inspiration to Cuarón in the development of his female characters. He has based much of the characterization of Cleo on the tenacity of Libo, aiming to replicate the grounded strengths he saw in his childhood caretaker rather than replicate the cinematic norm for strong female characters (Gordon).

            In its deviance from a character archetype, Cuarón’s Roma recrafts strong female characters based on his deep personal connection to the characters and the cultural history that informed them. Cuarón draws on the stories and experiences of Libo, his childhood nanny, to craft the character of Cleo. He refuses to rely on film tropes that define “strong female characters”: physical aggression or strength, dominance, and searches for power. Roma lacks male characters, and rather than attempt to compensate for this absence with masculine female characters, Cuarón leans into the feminine traits of Cleo. Cleo is defined by her compassion for the children she cares for and the support that she gives to Sofía, the matriarch of the family. Through every hardship Cleo bears, Cuarón is careful to ensure that even the struggles she faces are feminine in nature: a stillborn baby or a violent partner. This adherence to traditionally feminine traits in both the challenges Cleo faces and her reaction to them enables Cuarón to subvert expectations for male-focused examples of strength.

            Cuarón’s representation of strong women in Roma is not without its critics. Though Cleo has evolved during the beach scene, it is because of her loyalty to the family that she works for: “An ideologically informed reading of this scene would point out the problem with staging the servant’s transformational moment in terms of her saving Sofía’s children” (Marcantonio 43). Though painful, the depiction of Cleo’s development for the sake of the children she works for—following a consistent pattern in her life, in which almost everything she does is for her employing family—is a realistic representation of the life that domestic workers in Mexico have lived for centuries.

            Cuarón utilizes this hierarchal structure of 1970s Mexico while deviating from the masculine model of strength common in film to craft a realistic, alternative portrayal of strong female characters based on the female role-models of his childhood—women who not only endure through the challenges of the historical period in which they are based, but also represent a feminine version of endurance and strength.

            Cuarón is not the first filmmaker to explore the strength of feminine, motherly characters. Jason Reitman’s 2018 film Tully comes to mind, a film starring Charlize Theron that depicts the stresses and isolation of motherhood. The 2015 film Room similarly explores the bond between mother and child as it follows a kidnapped woman and her son. While Cuarón is not alone in his depiction of women as strong, resilient figures, his incorporation of the cultural structures involved in the lives of Cleo and Sofía adds another dimension to the film that Tully and Room operate without. This underlying cultural history adds strength to Cuarón’s characters as well as contextualizing their struggles.

            By refusing to subjugate his female characters to tropes of physical power or assertiveness, Cuarón’s Roma beautifully portrays alternative routes of strength for women in film. This stylistic choice creates genuine representation for women in film and recognizes the struggles that women, particularly domestic workers, face in the real world.

Brianna Riddle enrolled at the University of Florida in 2018 and is currently a third-year student in the College of Nursing. She has been an avid reader since she was a child and has grown to love film as well. This piece was written for a course and has been edited since then to further explore her thoughts on the film.

Works Cited

Dowling, Amber. "Redefining Acceptable Female Roles." Variety, vol. 345, no. 3, 2019, pp. 24-26, EBSCOhost, accession no. 138007980.

Gordon, Devin. “Roma Is the Latest Entry in Alfonso Cuarón's Feminist Oeuvre.” The Atlantic, 26 Jan. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/roma-alfonso-cuaron-feminist-filmography/580432/. Accessed 24 March 2020.

Hastie, Amelie. “An Act of Will, a Testimony of Love: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.” Film Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 54-60. https://filmquarterly.org/2019/06/07/the-vulnerable-spectator-an-act-of-will-a-testimony-of-love-alfonso-cuarons-roma/. Accessed 24 March 2020.

Kaufman, Alyssa. The Athena Effect: Strong Womxn or Straw Womxn? 2018. Western Washington University, Honors Thesis. https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwu_honors/97  

Marcantonio, Carla. “Roma: Silence, Language, and the Ambiguous Power of Affect.” Film Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 38-45. https://filmquarterly.org/2019/06/07/roma-silence-language-and-the-ambiguous-power-of-affect/. Accessed 31 March 2020.

O'Brien, Gabrielle. "Remembrance as Reconstruction: Excavating Memory in Roma." Screen Education, no. 96, 2019, pp. 8-15. EBSCOhost, accession no. 140441484.

Roma. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, performances by Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira, Netflix, 2018.

All images were screen-captured from the film, Roma.