Nada

Nada Más is as complex as the Cuban people itself. The little pieces of daily life activities get complicated by bore and danger. This movie have the kind of juice that make your head spin. The characters are well elaborated and portrayed in the caricaturing way of the silent film era. The viewer feel bouncing between hate, sympathy and despise for everyone involved in the plot and depending of the moment. This movie can be anything but boring. I recommend it.

Opinions seem to vary greatly about this film. Some viewers seem to like it, find it real cute, compare it to Amelie, enjoy the shifts in style and tone. Others seem to loathe it, find it derivative, decry the exaggerated acting, disjointed style and too simple story, and feel they have wasted 90 minutes watching it. The opinions run all over the map, as the grades and critics reviews show. Some love it, many hate it.

I don't understand the latter group. This is exactly the kind of film I enjoy, in the same style as the movies of Richard Lester and Maurizio Nichetti (the early ones like Ratataplan). Start with a rather original story: a lonely post office employee who rewrites letters in her spare time. Amelie came out at the same time, and features a young girl who also tries to change others lives, but in many ways Nada is more fun and less smug. The disjointed style and abrupt shifts of tone kept me entertained. Here is a director who loves to play around. The slapstick scenes were exaggerated, as they should be, the romantic scenes funny and touching, and two sections showing how the letters affect their recipients were, in my opinion, successfully poetic.

Malberti shows promising talent with interesting predominately black and white camera work, which sometimes imitates the style of silent comedy, from Chaplin features to Keystone Cops. The quirky editing, overhead shots, fanciful touches, and series of funny supporting characters all contribute to the movie's charm. Thais Valdez is really charming, at the same time a fun cute tomboy and a mature weary lover. She is a real find.

If you like your films sober, intellectual and serious pass this one up. If you are ready for a wild mixture of bureaucratic satire, introspective social drama, slapstick comedy, cute love story, Havana travelogue and some poetic moments then jump along... It's a real fun ride!

Although this has been called an over-the-top story some of the writing is done very passionately. I particularly enjoyed the letter being read while a women was taking a bath. I wish some of this passion could be present in more North American movies. Thais Valdes is an excellent actress and hopefully she can get more roles in movies like this in the near future. The satire with the bureaucracy in the mail office is dead on.

Since we in the United States don't often get to see Cuban movies*, it's refreshing to see "Nada". It portrays a woman named Carla Perez working in a Havana post office opening people's letters and rewriting them so as to make them more comprehensible and even poetic...much to the chagrin of her supervisors (who, if combined, would act like and resemble the Wicked Witch of the West). But this might set in motion a new path for Carla's relationships with people.

Aside from the main plot, the movie gives us a look at the lives of ordinary Cubans, far from the famous images of Fidel Castro and his cabinet. The black-and-white cinematography with a few objects colored gives one - well, gives me, at least - the sense of people feeling somewhat depressed in a world without guaranteed electricity, but trying as hard as possible to pull through.

One thing that I noticed in the movie is that all the characters had names beginning with C (Carla, Cunda, Concha, etc). I wonder what was up with that. It may have had something to do with Cuba beginning with C (along with Cuba's trading partner China).

Overall, worth seeing.

*It seems like this might also be the case in Cuba; I think that most of the movies which they get to see in Cuba come from - where else? - the United States.

I caught this Cuban film at at an arthouse film club. It was shown shortly after the magisterial 1935 Silly Symphony cartoon where the Isle of Symphony is reconciled with the Isle of Jazz. What with the recently deceased Ruben Gonzalez piped through speakers in this old cinema-ballroom and a Cuban flag hanging from peeling stucco rocaille motifs, the scene was set for a riproaring celebration of engaged filmmaking and synchronised hissing at the idiocies of Helms-Burton. But then the film started. And the cinema's peeling paint gradually became more interesting than the shoddy mess on-screen.

The storyline of Nada Mas promises much. Carla is a bored envelope-stamper at a Cuban post office. Her only escape from an altogether humdrum existence is to purloin letters and rewrite them, transforming basic interpersonal grunts into Brontëan outbursts of breathless emotion. Cue numerous shots of photogenic Cubans gushing with joy, grief, pity, terror and the like.

The problem is that the simplicity of the narrative is marred by endless excursions into film-school artiness, latino caricature, Marx brothers slapstick and even - during a particularly underwhelming editing trick - the celluloid scratching of a schoolkid defacement onto a character's face.

Unidimensional characters abound. Cunda, the boss at the post office, is a humourless dominatrix-nosferatu. Her boss-eyed accomplice, Concha, variously points fingers, eavesdrops and screeches. Cesar, the metalhead dolt and romantic interest, reveals hidden writing talent when Carla departs for Miami. A chase scene (in oh-so-hilarious fast-forward) is thrown in for good measure. All this would be fine in a Mortadello and Filemon comic strip, but in a black-and-white zero-FX flick with highbrow pretensions, ahem.

Nada Mas attempts to straddle the stile somewhere between the 'quirky-heroine-matchmakes-strangers' of Amelie and the 'poetry-as-great-redeemer' theme of Il Postino. Like Amelie, its protagonist is an eccentric single white female who combats impending spinsterdom by trying to bring magic into the lives of strangers. And like Il Postino, the film does not flinch from sustained recitals of poetry and a postman on a bicycle takes a romantic lead. Unfortunately, Nada Mas fails to capture the lushness and transcendence of either film.

There are two things that might merit watching this film in a late-night TV stupor. The first is the opening overhead shot of Carla on a checker-tiled floor, which cuts to the crossword puzzle she is working on. The second is to see Nada Mas as a cautionary example: our post Buena Vista Social Club obsession with Cuban artistic output can often blinker us into accepting any dross that features a bongo on the soundtrack. This film should not have merited a global release - films such as Waiting List and Guantanamera cover similar thematic territory far more successfully.