FIVE years ago the Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron lived out his childhood dreams of being an astronaut in the Oscar-winning Gravity, a film so technically demanding that the makers had to invent the cutting edge techniques as they went along.

Now Cuaron is back with a film that could not be more different. Set in 1970 in the middle class suburb of Roma in Mexico City, and shot in creamy black and white, Roma is a domestic drama that barely leaves the street in which it is set.

Two worlds, one up there, one down here, giving rise to two equally wonderful films with heroines at their heart. Where Gravity had Sandra Bullock battling grief solo, Roma has Yalitza Aparicio, playing Cleo, a family maid. Cleo is one of several women in Roma whose lot in life is to clear up the mess made by men. Besides being one of the year’s most beautiful films, Roma can lay serious claim to being its most feminist.

Cuaron opens, fittingly, with a long shot of a courtyard being cleaned. Bucket after bucket of soapy water sluices over the tiles, making everything clean and ready to be dirtied again. Five foot nothing but strong as a boxer, Cleo does everything for this family of four children, two parents, and one grandma, from picking up the dog’s mess to singing the children to sleep.

While Cleo plays a central part in family life she is not part of the family. Cuaron sums this up with a shrewd little scene in which Cleo is clearing up while the kids and parents are lolling on the sofa watching TV. Cleo sits down for a minute, one of the boys puts his arm around her. Just as she relaxes, the lady of the house, Sofia, asks her to make a cup of tea. It is just one of many reminders that this young woman from a remote village is a servant, working for board and lodging and not very much money.

In keeping with the rule that no mistress is a heroine to her maid, Cleo and her fellow maid Adela gently mock Sofia’s careful way with every penny. She is clingy with her husband, fraught, demanding, and given to bursts of temper. Not a sympathetic character, in short. She is also, hilariously, the world’s worst driver.

Cuaron, writing and directing, builds each character slowly, with only the most subtle of hints here and there. We may think we know Sofia’s “sort”, or Cleo’s for that matter, but as the film makes clear in its own time, we have much to learn, not least about the folly of judging others too hastily.

So we spend a year, 1970 heading into 1971, in the company of Cleo and her charges. It is a momentous year, one which takes in the troubled politics of the Mexico of the time. Landmark events, ones which determined the future of the country, play out. Alongside these are smaller, though no less significant, occurrences that will shape lives forever. There is joy here, but there is desperate sadness too, some of it difficult to watch.

Cuaron has called the partly biographical Roma a tribute to the women who brought him up. What women they turn out to be. Every man in the film, save for the family driver, turns out to be an unreliable waste of space. As a tired and emotional Sofia tells Cleo one night, “No matter what they tell you, women are always alone.” Yet one senses the boys in this family will grow up to be different men than their fathers and grandfathers, and so society progresses.

Roma is having an unusual release for a Netflix film in that it has been premiered at film festivals, and in some countries shown in cinemas, before appearing on the streaming platform. This nod of respect towards the big screen has not gone unnoticed by awards juries; Roma picked up the Golden Lion at Venice, and it is up for three Golden Globes. My advice: see it on the biggest screen you can with an ace projectionist on staff. Lucky Weegies have such a picture palace in the Glasgow Film Theatre.

GFT, till December 20, and on Netflix