[9.4/10] There’s a scene, about two-thirds of the way through *Roma*, that gives the film away. A flamboyant professor, famed for his televised acts of strength and daring, speaks to an assembled regiment of young martial arts enthusiasts and would-be revolutionaries. He tells them that for all their form and fury, the difference comes in strength of mind, in spirit, beyond what physical force they’ve just demonstrated. And he offers a demonstration of his own, an unshowy act of balance while blindfolded that seems underwhelming until he asks his followers to do the same. Suddenly, the wiry young men are teetering and stumbling like baby deer, and the small audience that’s gathered to hear the speech makes the same attempt and wobble and fail just as easily.

But amid the masses unable to maintain their balance in the face of this seemingly simply task, our hero, Cleo, masters it without a word in the crowd, while many months pregnant no less. No one seems to take notice. No one remarks on it. The camera even lingers just long enough for you to notice without letting you focus too hard. And yet with so much tumult and so many people struggling to match this primrose feat, only she can do it.

That seems to be the broader theme of *Roma*, an achingly human movie about the trials of a young indigenous maid in Mexico City, and the local family who gradually become hers. The film stands for the idea that there is an unassuming but undeniable strength in places where few people look. It says that we’re used to fortitude and power taking on masculine forms -- the loud shout with the act of violence, the grand machine steered to fit into an encroaching space -- but that the forms of strength more coded as feminine -- the ability to endure, to survive, to find ways to go on without grand shows or proud gestures -- reveal something quieter and unnoticed, but that much more powerful.

It is the type of power that allows women like Cleo to remain steady and firm and determined even when the world is in flux around her and throws obstacle after obstacle her way. It’s one that allows her employer, Sofia, to look after her family and start a newer, more honest life with them after her husband all but abandons them. It is a power founded on love, not in the *Harry Potter*-esque sense of heartening connections to others evincing a nigh-magical boost or protection, but in the more down-to-earth fashion of how love for someone motivates you to soldier on, to hold it together when everything is breaking apart around you, to go walking into the breach because the people you care about are there and they need you. There is a nurturing strength at the heart of *Roma*, and writer-director Alfonso Cuarón (who himself dabbled in Potterland as a director), offers this feature-length paeon to that type of overlooked, but all the more laudable kind of strength.

As much as the understated performance from star Yalitza Aparicio drives that point home, and Cuarón’s subtle script does the same, it’s his camera that communicates the idea visually at nearly every moment in the film. *Roma* is full of Cuarón’s trademark long, panning shots that drink in the surroundings, and let the viewer drink in the depth and scenery that still pops in black and white, and appreciate the exquisite choreography on display. But throughout the film’s run time, Cuarón, who also doubled as the film’s cinematographer, keeps Cleo at the center of all that chaos, making her a pillar of stability when there is utter tumult around her. It’s a cliché to say it, but the camera really is another character in this movie, an unseen presence surveying each scene and let you know exactly who to watch and focus on amid all of those moving parts, however soft-spoken and unassuming she may be. So often, as someone from a different class and culture, Cleo is rendered into the background, but Cuarón finds her, time and again, while still deftly highlighting the way so little of the rest of the world manages to do the same.

At the same time, as much as the film lives in the spaces of Cleo’s subtle expressions and reactions to major events, it unleashes its own power in the moments when this otherwise preternaturally calm and collected young woman breaks down. Which is to say that *Roma* made me cry. It made me cry tears of sadness. It made me cry tears of joy. It even made me tear up a little bit right now just thinking about the film’s most harrowing and powerful moments.

If you can hold back such saltwater in *Roma*’s most difficult and cathartic scenes, you are made of stronger stuff than I. There is so much to the scene where Cleo gives birth to her stillborn daughter. As in the rest of the film, there is so much going on all at once, the combination of unimaginable pain, the sense of ordered chaos, the precision and detachment of the medical team that sees to her, the way Cuaron’s camera refuses to look away from any of it, confronting you with not only the process but the anguish interspersed with procedure that makes these events gripping but grounded.

And there is so much to the simple but gobsmacking scene where Cleo, who cannot swim, rescues two of the children in her care after they are pulled out by the current, and in the pique of the experience, confesses her guilt that she did not want her child, only to be given nothing but love, gratitude, and comfort by the people for whom she was once a caretaker, but has since become family. If there is a better three-minute encapsulation of devotion, resolution, confession, humanity, absolution, and yes, love, in cinema, I certainly haven’t seen it.

It is *Roma*’s most nakedly emotional scene, which uncorks the built up tension and sentiment bubbling neatly beneath the surface for the past two hours. In letting it out, in showing the lengths that Cleo has gone and can go, it unveils so much of that determination, that capability, that strength which she, and women like her, carry down in places where no one sees because so few bother to look. But *Roma* looks, at the women who carry on despite the men who so wantonly leave them behind, at the hardships and challenges endured without complaint or cracking, and at the human moments when the cracks show and the incredible force being contained spills out into the open, showing us not only what it must take to hold it in, but the acceptance and affection and understanding that meets it when it’s finally let out.