Review - Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's fine cinematic adaptation of Edmundo Desnoes' novella is many things at once: conflicted character study, invaluable time capsule, tasteful agitprop and timely political allegory. It centers on Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), a lethargic, intellectually inclined Cuban bourgeois kicking around Havana after his family and friends leave the country in the early days of the Castro regime. "Neither revolutionary nor counterrevolutionary," he has stayed put simply because he doesn't know what else to do. He's not particularly cut out for any of the paths open to him in a nascent communist society, and while he does feel a certain pained pride in his country's hard-fought independence, he secretly hopes that his comfortable lifestyle will not have to be sacrificed for the greater good. (It had been subsidized by rental income from private property, since disallowed by the new government.) Admittedly "Europeanized" by his American education, Sergio regards his countrymen as if through glass, generally preferring to survey them with binoculars from the veranda of his lavish top-floor apartment. In this manner, he watches as the nation transitions into autonomy, well aware that, once again, he stands to be left behind.

Shot in 1968 but set in the time between the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Missile Crisis of 1962, Alea's work is technically a period piece. Viewers will likely be too busy cherishing the sights and sounds of late 60's Cuba to notice though. Not yet frozen in time by the trade embargo and decades of isolation, Havana is a vibrant metropolis in which the protagonist and his fellow denizens go about the business of living - flirting, dancing, fighting and marching against a tropical backdrop papered with propaganda and punctuated by violence. It's far from Paris, or even Prague, but that does not stop the director from enlivening his loose narrative with unconventional elements - still photography, comic strips, candid street scenes, reportage - as well as feather-light editing and restless camerawork that could easily qualify it as the first movie of the Cuban New-Wave. Facile tags aside, the film has much to say about the place of the sedate intellectual in a fast-changing world, and of modern man's need to strike a balance between First World learnedness and Third World conviction. It's thoroughly intelligent, effortlessly stylish, and undoubtedly a landmark of Latin American cinema.