Guantanamera - Eine Leiche auf Reisen

If you care about the evolution of thinking regarding social organization, you will necessarily have to go through the biggest fracture in the post-ww2 world. the iron curtain. it's up to you making your own opinion regarding what each side had to offer, and which sides on each side you support. To help you make up your mind you have to rely on the stories told by those who lived in the flesh the problems and advantages of those worlds. I mean the honest thinkers, or people with honest stories to tell. If you deepen your research on the soviet branch of the curtain, you will necessarily face the cuban case. It's a fascinating story. And within that story, there are a few honest storytellers. Korda, and Gutierrez-Alea are the most meaningful, they work with images. But while Korda is fundamentally important because he followed the process, the revolution, Gutierrez is someone who was at the beginning, and kept telling his honest version of the reality until his death. Just before that, he made this beautiful film.

So, we know we will watch in his films the narrative of someone who never ceased to make questions, and denounce what he believed was bad, as much as he had denounced the pre-Castro abuses, and as much as he had genuinely embraced the revolution. This is his vision, in the mid 90'. Disenchanted, cynic, ironic. Few times has the road-trip been so metaphorical, so invested with the notion of journey, through time(s), hardly through physical space. Also you can invest any symbolic weight to the corpse they transport. But what i care about is the pure talent Alea had as a true cinematic storyteller. My bet is that he started with images, loose disconnected images that he wanted to pass. Just like the final shot in this film. Than he worked hard on building a narrative structure than could competently, coherently and, y say, poetically, integrate all his multiple visions. The fun thing about his film is that the multiplicity of visions from the same beautiful mind is reflected in the various story lines we follow, each with its own tone, and mode. We have the soap opera story that surrounds the funny life of Mariano, multiple women that mean sex, to him, and one platonic love, reluctant to be consumed. We have the cynic critic to the regime totally invested in the stupidity of the whole funeral service business. That business about inventing rules to spare fuel; all that represented by the frigid bureaucratic husband, a sad portrait to a by now (and than) sad system. Than the heaviest drama falls upon the most delicate soul in the living characters, the old widow, husband to a late artist, the one who never ceases to care about people, eventually the one true love in the story (i'm not sure to consider the teacher a woman in love). Alea doesn't spare on the cynic posture, so the black humour with the corpse, near the end, really grows an uneasy feel on you. All these lines are perfectly integrated by a well managed road trip, and a good adaptation of an eternal song, which incidentally is an avatar for the cuban soul.

This is like an Italian post-modern "sweet" film, but better, because it is more meaningful.

My opinion: 4/5

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Guantanamera is a movie that encompasses the genre of a road movie and love story. Gina's Aunt Yoyita from Havana, who was once a famous performer, is in Guantanamera to receive an award. During the award ceremony, she notices her long lost love from 50 years ago, Candido. The relationship rekindles and the two are in love once again. When Yoyita suddenly dies, her body needs to be transported back to Havana. Gina's husband Adolfo, who is an undertaker for the state, takes charge of everything and arranges Yoyita's long complicated journey home. Adolfo is an arrogant abuser who has no respect for his wife. At one point he visualizes himself on top of a statue, as the leader. Accompanied by a driver, Adolfo, Gina, and Candido make the long complicated journey to Havana transporting Yoyita from vehicle to vehicle implementing Adolfo's new money saving plan. During the journey, Gina encounters one of her prior students, a womanizing trucker named Mariano, who has longed for Gina since she was his teacher. The two find themselves running into each other at different points along the way. Is Adolfo worthy of Gina's love, or does Mariano finally win his long lost teacher? The director makes it a point for the camera to show us the lush tropical background of Cuba, as well as the poor, dirty, poverty stricken areas displaying billboards with political messages indicating corruption. During the journey, Mariano and Ramon are seen picking up hitchhikers delivering them, as well as, the product on the bed of the truck. The roads are unpaved and dirty showing the economic hardship of the region. Favors are done in exchange for monetary reward, evidence of economic corruption. The film techniques used are similar to those used in Hollywood. They include the use of brightly lit scenes, with most being filmed outside, using natural daylight. The cinematography was mostly at eye level with a motion picture camera,showing steady, smooth scenes. The film was slow paced but kept my attention.

A small look at life in Cuba, "Guantanamera" portrays a world-famous Cuban singer returning to her hometown and suddenly dying. Her funeral procession reveals several things about the people involved, namely the love-starved existence of a woman sick of her creepy husband.

Obviously, we in the United States only get to hear about Cuba occasionally, so at the very least this movie should provide some insight into the state of affairs there (or just to hear the Cuban dialect, with its dropping of esses). But anything looking at people's individuals lives and how policies have affected them gets praise from me. We see how people have to abide by food rationing, among other things (of course, this is mainly due to the US blockade against the island). So I recommend this film.

Guantanamera, a Cuban light drama by accomplished director Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1928-1996), is a tropical road movie. The setting is the 1990s, following withdrawal of USSR support for its little-brother Communist regime. A woman dies, some distance removed from Havana, and the goal is to transport her to the capital for burial. A tiny entourage of family accompanies the hearse.

Some snippets, though not central to the plot: How do government-run funeral homes work exactly, in a Communist country? Well, first, there is a per-person quota of refreshments for the bereaved and acquaintances who are paying last respects. But doesn't this attract inauthentic freeloaders? Second, there is a scene involving a meeting of regional mortuary-manager bureaucrats. If travel expenses for hearse trips are allocated according to the relative mileage of the territories through which vehicles traipse, the funeral home functionary in a crossroads region takes more than her share of budgetary hits. Is that fair? Third, there is the question of why the burial in Havana in the first place. If everybody and everywhere in Cuba are socialistically equal, what's wrong with the deceased staying put where she was? Meanwhile, we also have organized hitchhiking. Officials have the power to commandeer vacant seats from those who have for those who need.

There is some Latino romance, and some lightly subversive free enterprise. All in all, a likable movie. Mirta Ibarra, who starred twelve years earlier in Alea's 1983 film, Up To a Certain Point, gets an encore. She plays the niece of the deceased, who is also the wife of the over-serious Daniel Ortega-looking official who's in charge of the expedition.

As pure entertainment, the film does seem scattered and unfocused. However, it packs in many social, political and cultural messages on different levels. For instance, as the characters enter Bayamo, we hear a tour guide telling of Bayamo as historical center for smuggling and how this motivated rebellious action against colonial Spain. I took this as a commentary about present-day Cuba. The film is filled with metaphors, starting, of course, with the plot: a former economics teacher falls in love with a trucker and leaves her crass, heartless, bureaucrat husband. To really enjoy this movie, you have to understand that it is a report on the state of the country, and the characters and plot serve to veil documentary as movie fiction. Knowledge about recent Cuban history certainly helps understanding the movie, though, and you may want to see other films or read about present-day Cuba first.