Men and women see the world differently. Women know this. It is not clear to me that men do, even well-meaning ones. Take the Netflix film Roma, which is easily as entrancing as male reviewers say it is — women will not be permitted to review movies in any numbers until the film industry finally goes over the cliff — and has me fully in its grip.

The Roma I saw is not the Roma these men saw. It’s as if I saw it in Spanish and they came out glutinously praising its handling of the German demotic.

Thanks to director Alfonso Cuarón’s panoramic Antonioni-tribute camera work, I cannot now cross a room without imagining the entire house as my frame and the world in black-and-white. Roma is that good. It lures you into seeing stairs, bookshelves, gates and floors as carefully lit backdrops that constrict the human.

The protagonist, Cleodegaria Gutiérrez, known as Cleo, is a live-in nanny of Mixtec origin working in a 1970s suburban Mexico City household.

She is always in motion, mopping, carrying, scrubbing, cooking, supervising four children, answering doors, washing clothes, cleaning plates, sitting on the floor while the family sits in chairs, getting up to bring the doctor tea, and singing to toddlers at bedtime. But thanks to Cuarón’s photorealistic portrait lighting, we see her daily life with a light-and-shade majesty that would have given Ansel Adams pause.

The character of Cleo is based on Cuarón’s own beloved childhood nanny, and played by Yalitza Aparicio, who has never acted before. The family comprises the frazzled mother Sofia, the children, and a ghost of a father, an ugly snappish clod who is having an affair and secretly dumps them, leaving them unaware and penniless.

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Cleo is “seeing” a mean young man devoted to unemployment and martial arts. After sex, he swings his penis over and around her, performing martial arts moves with a shower curtain rod to impress her while recounting the story of his sad life and glorious future. Him, him, him, it’s all about him.

When she tells him on a date that she is pregnant, he leaves the movie theatre and never comes back. When she finds him, he says he’ll “beat the shit out of you and your ‘little one’” and threatens her with a weapon.

While Cleo is terrified of being fired, a wretched Sofia is being sexually assaulted by her husband’s friend. Both women worry about money and fear for the children they love. Then comes the moment. Sofia slumps down on the stairs with Cleo and says with great intensity, “We are alone. No matter what they tell you, we women are always alone.”

There are many things going on in Roma, including class conflict, rural dangers vs. urban ones, tyrannical government, a massacre of student demonstrators, Cleo’s medical care, racial classification, isolation, the secret knowledge of small children, and Cuarón’s gorgeous visual games with straight lines, with water.

But it is a story of women. I keep thinking of Stieg Larsson’s Men Who Hate Women, the original title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but the publisher didn’t like it. Roma could just as easily have Larsson’s original title.

But men did not see that. One Canadian commentator — a pompous guy, a “fine fellow” as I call them — summed up Roma on Twitter as the story of a domestic servant working for “the family of a Mexico City doctor.” But the doctor, complaining about dog crap in the driveway, is the smallest person in the film. Why mention him?

The critic mentions indigeneity — but not femininity — in Roma and cartoonishly compares it to Get Out because Get Out has a black actor. He deplores films about rich whites, praises a film about poor men, and never mentions Cleo again, not her fears, her pregnancy, the terrible childbirth, or the terrifying scene at the end.

“The world is so big! There is so much to know about it! Why do we keep the lens on the same kind of people all the time?” he asks. Because of men like him who seem not to see women.

Did this fine fellow really miss the scene where the leaping young psychopath swings his penis over and about Cleo, a dance of triumph? Poor Cuarón is laying it on with a trowel for the clueless sector of the audience.

A New Yorker critic says, “Do not look to Roma for the bristle of agony or dread.” Really? Cleo’s life was packed with both; I was nailed to my seat. A Guardian review mentions almost nothing about Cleo and Sofia’s destruction at the hands of men. Variety calls Roma “a snapshot Marxist adventure told from a family-eye view” and I’ll just leave it there.

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Do men really not notice when a director presents them for ridicule? Trump’s male cabinet, hauled in to praise him on camera for posterity, must be self-medicating to get through it.

But maybe these men aren’t on Adderall. Maybe they’re just fine fellows all.

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