Cine Cubano después de 1959

"Memories of Underdevelopment"

The New York Times

The time is 1961, not long after the Bay of Pigs, and Sergio (Sergio Correri), the hero of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's superb Cuban film, Memories of Underdevelopment, moves through Havana as if he were a scuba diver exploring the ruins of a civilization he abhors but cannot bear to leave. The world he sees is startlingly clear. It is also remote. The sounds he hears are his own 
thoughts. 

"Everything happens to me too early or too late," says Sergio, an intellectual in his late thirties whose critical faculties have effectively rendered him incapable of any action whatsoever. After his estranged wife and his mother and father have fled to Miami, with the other bourgeoisie, he thinks he will write the novel he has always thought about, but then Sergio's standards are too high to allow him to add to the sum total of civilization's second rate-ness. He finds himself blocked. 

Perhaps if the revolution had happened earlier, he tells himself, he might have understood. Sergio makes half-hearted little efforts to mantain his old ways. He picks up Elena (Daisy Granados), a pretty, bird brained girl who wants to be an actress, and he tries to educate (he says "Europeanize") her. He takes her to art galleries and buys her books but her brain remains unreconstructed and birdlike. "She doesn't relate to things," he tells himself. "It's one of the signs of underdevelopment" 

He takes Elena on a sightseeing tour of Hemingway's house. "He said he killed so as not to kill himself," Sergio remembers, looking at some mounted antlers. "In the end he could no resist temptation". Even suicide is beyond Sergio. All he can do is observe, much of the time through a telescope on the terrace of a penthouse apartment he must give up, sooner or later. 

Memories of Underdevelopment is a fascinating achievement. Here is a film about alienation that is wise, sad, and often funny, and that never slips into the bored and boring attitudes that wreck Antonioni's later films. Sergio is detached and wary, but around him is a hurricane of life. 

Gutiérrez Alea was forty when he made Memories (in 1968), and he is clearly a man, like Sergio, whose sensibilities are European. Yet unlike Sergio, and unlike the director of Eclipse and Red Desert, he is so full of passion and political commitment that he has been able to make an essentially pro-revolutionary film in which Castro's revolution is observed through eyes dim with bafflement. 

The result is hugely effective and moving, and it is complete in the way that very few movies ever are. I haven't read Edmundo Desnoes' original novel (published here as Inconsolable Memories), but I like the fact that Desnoes apparently likes the film that, in his words, had to be "a betrayal" of the book to be a good film. Gutiérrez Alea says the author, in the film's program notes, "objectified a world that was shapeless in my mind and still abstract in the book. He added social density . . ." 

Memories of Underdevelopment was one of the films scheduled to be shown here last year at the aborted Cuban Film Festival. It finally opened yesterday at the First Avenue Screening Room where it will play one week and then, I hope, it will move to another theater for the long run it deserves.