Was Tomás Gutiérrez Alea the only Cuban director to remain in the country and develop a significant international reputation? This inventive work, both ‘essay film’ and Rake’s Progress report, his best known. Released in 1968, it covers the early ‘60s in Cuba’s revolution (think Bay of Pigs thru the Missile Crisis) with a style that’s pure Nouvelle Vague, and a startlingly apolitical protagonist, a Cuban flaneur to walk us thru layers of Havana society. Played sympathetically in spite of his actions by Sergio Corrieri, very much in the manner of Marcello Mastroianni*, we first see him bidding an unemotional farewell to his family: parents, wife, relatives, off to Miami, part of the White middle-class flight from revolutionary mores, manners and financial upheaval. So what’s keeping Sergio there? Inertia? Income from rental properties? Possible sexual adventures? That’s how he gets into trouble. Seducing a girl he met on the street. An innocent young thing. Turns out she’s 17. Warning signs all but posted on every curve of her body. Intellectually naive, too. Watch on a tour of Ernest Hemingway’s home; already a tourist site with the man fresh in his grave. (Her hysterical family not far behind her in self-serving motive.) Sergio seemingly unharmed and unchanged by these personal bothers, indolence unshaken by the events churning around him. Somehow Alea even got away with showing what a bore Castro was whenever you put a microphone in his front of him. The whole film even more fascinating now than it must have been in ‘68. With a recent restoration that has it looking better than it has in decades. Essential viewing even at its most unpleasant.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The echoes of Mastroianni the main exception to Nouvelle Vague style. Not that Mastroianni didn’t make any Nouvelle Vague, but not what he’s known for. Corrieri superb in the part yet with only 10 other film credits. Few opportunities at the time in Cuba?
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