Revolutionary Ennui

By JAY COCKS

MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT

Directed and Screenplay by

TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA

This is a work of considerable accomplishment and historic importance: the first Cuban film to be shown in the U.S. since relations with Havana grew grim. Indeed, Washington spent a great deal of time deciding whether to let the movie into the country at all, and finally decided to allow it to be shown "for educational purposes."

It is difficult to see what anyone could find subversive in this intense, loosely structured narrative about the life of a middle-class intellectual in the days after the Castro revolution. The movie is complex, intelligent and totally lacking in hortatory propaganda. Tomas Gutierrez Alea is a director of cool passion and careful control. It is the measured force of Memories of Under development, as well as the novelty of its appearance, that has occasioned a critical reception somewhere between rapture and delirium. Yet just as it does not merit governmental suspicion, the movie cannot fully sustain that kind of response.

The opening moments of Memories are its finest. The credits flash over a kinetic, desperate dance sequence. The screen is crowded with faces; bodies whirl about to an African rhythm. There is, through all the noise and the music, the suggestion of a gunshot, and suddenly a lifeless body appears in the middle of the dance. The music gathers force, people crowd in, the corpse is lifted away, the dance goes on--and the image freezes on the anxious, frightened face of a black woman staring out into the audience. The scene has extraordinary energy, with its suggestions of abrupt but casual violence, al ways threatening but quickly absorbed. The very next scene balances and complements it: a long interlude of fare wells at the Havana airport, families breaking up, hurrying to leave the country for Miami. Here is the first introduction of Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), who remains in Cuba by choice while his wife and parents fly to America. His farewell is unique among the oth rs all around him for its detachment. Watching his wife and parents leave, Sergio is not seeing his life out but watching it begin.

Sergio considers his country very like himself: stunted, uncertain, still suffering from the physical and psychological effects of "underdevelopment." He lives off the income he still receives on apartments the government took away from him, and tries to be a writer, sifting through the shards of his own and Cuba's past. He has lazy, erotic daydreams about his cleaning lady (Eslinda Nunez); he takes up with a girl called Elena (Daisy Granados), then loses interest in her. Her family drags him to court, where he watches the proceedings while considering that before the revolution he would have been judged innocent solely on the basis of his class; now, he thinks, the court will side with the girl's poor family. Instead he is exonerated.

As he spends a restless night, still trying to define his moral and intellectual status, the city outside mobilizes for a possible military invasion. There are phantom images of guns being hauled up to roofs and tanks rumbling through the gray morning streets. It is the time of the missile crisis.

What is most ambitious in the film--the delicate correlation between political reality and subjective experience--is what works least well. What matters most, however, is Gutierrez Alea's bright, hard intelligence and his restlessness, his searching after both political and human resolution.

* Jay Cocks

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