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NY Times, Jan. 12, 2018
Outside Cuba’s Revolution, Looking In
By J. HOBERMAN
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s “Memories of Underdevelopment,” shot in Cuba some
50 years ago and showing for a week at Film Forum in an excellent 4K
digital restoration, is a first-rate movie and a remarkable document —
not least for the reception it first received in the United States.
“Memories” was adapted from Edmundo Desnoes’s novel, published in
English as “Inconsolable Memories.” An ambivalent account of life in
Castro’s Cuba, written in the first person, Mr. Desnoes’s
post-revolutionary novel has affinities to pre-revolutionary Russian
literature. His protagonist, Sergio, a 38-year-old Havana native, is
neither for nor against the revolution. An indolent bourgeois living off
the rent from a building his father — gone to Miami — left behind, he is
what Turgenev might call “a superfluous man.”
Sergio imagines himself European, and as played by the urbane Sergio
Corrieri, Alea’s protagonist reminded some of European actors like
Marcello Mastroianni and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Contemptuous of those
who have fled Cuba and indifferent to the Castro supporters around him,
Sergio indulges in erotic reveries, entertaining fantasies about his
maid and memories of a high school sweetheart.
Drifting into an affair with a flighty teenager, Elena (Daisy Granados),
Sergio equates her lack of education with Cuba’s underdevelopment,
taking her to museums that, in a particularly sardonic sequence, include
Ernest Hemingway’s villa. Late in the movie, reality crashes in — first
with the arrival of Elena’s irate family and second in the form of the
October 1962 missile crisis.
While closely adapted from Mr. Desnoes’s novel, Alea’s film is greatly
enriched by interpolated newsreel material. Sergio’s alienation is
placed in the context of pre-revolutionary poverty and
post-revolutionary political trials, as well the aftermath of the failed
Bay of Pigs invasion. “Memories” is a very much a new wave film in its
freewheeling mix of cinéma vérité-style hand-held street scenes and
playful freeze frames. It is also self-referential: Sergio attends a
round table discussion on revolutionary art in which one participant is
Mr. Desnoes. (“What are you doing up there with that cigar?” Sergio
wonders to himself.)
“Memories of Underdevelopment” had its world premiere at the Pesaro Film
Festival in 1968 but would not be seen here until it was included in the
1972 edition of the New Directors/New Films series, presented by the
Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A month
later, the print was seized by federal agents before it could be shown
at a festival of new Cuban films that had already been disrupted by
anti-Castro exiles.
The movie finally opened at a small cinema in May 1973; it received
glowing reviews, including one by the New York Times critic Vincent
Canby, as well as an award from the National Society of Film Critics.
The Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris, speaking at an awards ceremony
that the United States government denied Alea a visa to attend, hailed
the director as a courageous dissident.
That Alea, who made numerous films in Cuba before his death in 1996,
could be simultaneously a dangerous alien and a free-speech hero is a
perverse tribute to his film’s nuanced politics. “Memories” is not only
shot in black and white but also composed in shades of gray.
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