La Habanera

An incredibly stupid film, this one should be avoided. Leander has done so much better work for the screen, and one shouldn't waste one's time on this miserable attempt to create the exotic, sensual southern atmosphere that would make the middle class German hausfrau's heart beat quicker. Leander herself is much better in less melodrama, and in this particular film she doesn't even have the best possible songs to sing. Go for something else instead.

This is the first of the two melodramas Detlef Sierck made with Zarah Leander,and although it is more celebrated and more popular,I think that its screenplay is definitely weaker than that of "Zu Neue Ufern" aka "Paramatta" or even the overlooked " Stutzen Der Gesellschaft" (1935) which predates many of Sierck's topics which will be developed in "all that Heaven allows" notably.But the directing is more inventive in "Habanera".

It's strange that both "Habanera" and "zu Neue Ufern" are "exotic" works ,both taking place in South America;but while in the latter ,Europa (England that is) is considered a country where prudery (this scandalous show!)and cruelty (the heroine is sentenced to hard labor for 600 miserable pounds)rule,it plays an opposite role in the former:Sweden is some kind of Eldorado -one should note that Detlef Sierck is Danish and his star is Swedish- where civilization reigns and where science and medicine allow their citizens to live in freedom and happiness.The heroine's new hot land is the country of crooked physicians ,of corrupt cops ,of evil.

Detlef Sierck's directing is the best of the four German movies I've seen by him.He creates a stifling atmosphere with his dark rooms ,without showing any sun,where the shadows of the blinds reflect on the heroine and give the viewer the strange feeling she is in jail.The only freshness he gets is provided by a sequence in Sweden and,oddly,when the heroine tells her son about her country .

Zarah Leander sings ,but nothing here approaches her sensational "yes sir ,no sir" in the music hall in "Zu Neue Ufern" .But her rendition of "la Habanera" has a great emotional power ,because her former love is listening to her .

To those who would think that Sirk was embracing Nazi ideology: 1)He left Germany after "zu neuen Ufern" the same year. 2)His first American movie "Hitler's madman" was a strong anti-Nazi manifesto,actually propaganda 3)He made " a time to love and a time to die" in 1958,from E.M.Remarque,the pacifist writer whose books were burned by the Nazis;it tells the story of a German soldier who died in WW2;exactly what happened to Sirk's own son.

I recently watched Veit Harlan's 1940 Nazi propaganda "Jud Suss," "the most hateful" film ever made. I had to see more of its star, the actor Ferdinand Marian.

The first eighteen minutes of "La Habanera" constitute one of the most beautiful, economical sequences in film. The camera glides like the most sinuous and powerful of ballroom dancers; shots and sound accumulate artistic power like the carefully placed words in a sonnet. On the dramatic seaside cliff of a tropical isle, Astree (Zarah Leander), a sheltered Swedish tourist, watches Flamenco. The camera caresses everything it sees: sea, foam, rock face, palm fronds, the costume of the Flamenco dancer, her pride in her skill, Spanish and Indian physiognomies. With variations that make your heart ache, like the notes of a fugue, the same visual motifs replay throughout the film: exotically costumed women performing for audiences, caged birds, men saying goodbye, water, both wild and domesticated, fruits, flowers, and light filtered and fractured by venetian blinds, mosquito nets, ceiling fans, and snow. The ear as well as the eye is invited to participate in the dream: the shrill call of a bigoted aunt, "Astree, Astree!" frosts the most tender of moments, the bullfight crowd roars. "La Habanera" engulfs you; you're on vacation. Director Douglas Sirk's artistry never lets up till the final frame; symmetry serves as the strands of his web. "La Habanera," the title song, is insistently seductive as a toreador – you want to sway with his hips and let him dictate movement – and then it is grating and cruelly taunting – you want to slam shut the window and silence the singers – and, finally, it is heartbreakingly poignant – you want to follow, but realize that you no longer can.

A jeep driver with one flower behind his ear, another in his teeth, and a song in his heart picks up Astree and her overbearing, very chesty dowager aunt. They encounter Don Pedro de Avila, the island's padrone, astride a black horse. His face is framed by a wide-brimmed black hat and embroidered lapels. This romance-novel hero escorts the Swedish ladies to a bullfight. Don Pedro communicates his masterful inhabitation of his body. His steps spring; his arm, greeting spectators, sweeps with the majesty of inherited noblesse oblige; his hand nonchalantly tosses a handkerchief into a deferential peon's proffered hat, thus releasing a raging bull. When Don Pedro smiles his warm, crinkly-eyed smile at Astree, it is as if the sun is rising in the east. He is manly; when the bullfighter fails, it is he, at Astree's command, who dispatches the bull "with one thrust to the heart." He is attentive; Astree drops her fan in the bullring, and Pedro retrieves it, snaps it open, and returns it to Astree with a gesture that Nijinski could not perform with more seductive grace. Don Pedro accompanies Astree and Aunt Anna to their ship; he walks backward, away from the ship; there is a tension in his step as if he were a mime imitating a man saying goodbye to his love who is leaving aboard a ship. He pauses behind dockside exports to light a cigarette; even that casual, mundane move conveys erotic power. Within seconds, Astree has jumped ship; she's in his arms and her fate is sealed.

Fast forward ten years. Don Pedro, much aged, addresses Astree, nowhere to be seen. In her place, across an elegant armchair, drapes a lovely, lacey cloud, reminiscent of a brides' wedding gown. With a riding crop, Don Pedro tentatively taps, then seductively strokes, this white dress. His aggression rising, again, using the riding crop, he lifts the dress, as if lasciviously lifting a woman's hem. He then grabs the dress, manhandles it, rips it viciously, and throws it down. Only then does a very changed Astree enter. Her youth is gone. She, who had been so wild, gay, and impetuous, is now sober and resigned. Sirk has conveyed the previous ten years in Don Pedro's treatment of Astree's dress. Worship and passion morphed into obsession and then descended into oppression and contempt. Astree tells Don Pedro that she's come to despise the island, and him; she deeply regrets ever leaving cold, blond, superior Sweden.

Later, in a climactic scene, before hurting Don Pedro badly, Astree performs a profoundly sentimental gesture. She dons a traditional Caribbean costume Pedro had given her. By wearing this dress at a key moment, Astree gives Don Pedro a gift. Similarly, director Douglas Sirk, who was the husband of a Jewish wife, gives the audience, a gift. This scene undercuts the "Swede = superior; Caribbean = inferior" message. As Astree sings, Don Pedro watches her; he becomes ecstatic; it is clear that no matter how Nazi ideology or melodramatic convention dictate that this movie end, no one will ever love Astree as her racially "inferior," dark lover has. Pedro breathes her in like air; she moves him as his drug of choice. You know from watching her watching him that Don Pedro has given Astree the most unforgettable nights of her life.

There's so much else to talk about in this film, from the goofy font used in the opening title sequence to Astree's emotionally incestuous interactions with her strikingly cold, blond son. There's "Rosita," the male cross-dresser and Frieda-Kahlo imitator who plays Pedro's housekeeper. Rosita dresses like a nun, part of the film's anti-Catholic, pro-science, as well as anti-Caribbean, pro-Swedish, subtext. There's Dr. Gomez, a Simon-Abkarian lookalike, who, in a very funny scene, is regaled by a gallbladder-obsessed hypochondriac. There's Puerto Rico fever, perfidious islanders and the heroic Swedish doctor who fights both. There's the breathtakingly beautiful Zarah Leander, marketed as Nazi Germany's substitute for Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. But what this film amply demonstrates is that Ferdinand Marian was a compelling actor worthy of remembrance for so much more than having been coerced to appear in "Jud Suss," the "most hateful" film ever made.

I love this film. I love it for itself, and I love it for the light it sheds on Sirk's later Universal pictures of the '50's. The DVD from Kino comes with a brilliant little essay by Jan-Christopher Horak where, among other things, he asks the question "But was it (this film) really transgressive?" This same question has been asked about Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life and all the others. And all of us who love Sirk's films need to ask ourselves this question from time to time. I can say that what I find transgressive in Sirk's work is the multiplicity of angles and approaches that the films reveal. They dare to find the beauty and truth in melodrama. They dare to be ironic without snickering. For all the acclaim that Far From Heaven received, no one, as far as I know, commented on the fact that, compared to Sirk, Haynes stacks the deck. None of his minor characters have the emotional or psychological complexity that Sirk's do. They are stick figures for us to laugh knowingly at. They are "camp". But Sirk plunges into his work with such camp icons as Leander (here) and Rock Hudson (elsewhere) and comes up with a text that continues to resonate long after the images have flickered away.

Horak goes on to say that in this film, Puerto Rico is exciting, exotic and dangerous, a typography of the Other, while Sweden represents "all that is Heimat". A vision of Aryan homeland, and thus a site for subliminal Nazi ideology. Did Sirk do no more than artistically mirror the status quo? I think not.Sirk was a successful director of "women's pictures" in the early days of the Third Reich, just as he was in the America of the '50's. What is oppositional in his work is not any kind of obvious political subtext, but an attitude towards image and material where the despotic Don Pedro is counterpoised with the smothering, nearly incestuous Astree. And both of them are covered in shadows, slats, mirrors, flowers - all of the accoutrements of the Sirkian hothouse atmosphere. Some sickly-sweet, unhealthy thing is always insinuating itself into the mise - en - scene. Sirk is like what Walter Benjamin called Baudelaire: a secret agent of his class and society. His missives send images of that society to its members that correspond to the vision they have of themselves. And underneath that there is another level of text. Nothing so obvious as "critique". But portraiture - "la verite en peinture" - sometimes as devastating as Goya's.

"La Habanera" has not a very high intrinsic value. The plot is a romance with a very predictable happy end.

The film has however some historical interest. It was made by Douglas Sirk when he was still in Germany and operated under his real name Detlef Sierck. Sierck went ultimately to the USA but he did so later than other German directors. "La Habanera" was made in 1937 when the Nazi regime was already in power for a few years. Together with the fact that the screenplay was written by Gerhard Menzel, a writer who was also involved with some of the worst Nazi propaganda, the film got a bad name for a long time. Objectively there is much escapism and very little Nazi ideology in the plot. The film is much less "politically incorrect" than the oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl, and even her films are gradually being reassessed according to artistic (and not political) standards

Like Fritz Lang Douglas Sirk was married to a wife with Nazi sympathies. His second wife was Jewish and of course they wanted to leave Nazi Germany. At this time the story of his life showed striking similarities with the story of the main character of "La Habanera". Leaving the country with his second wife also meant leaving behind the son that he had with his first wife. This son stayed in Germany with his Nazi mother, played as child star in Nazi propaganda and died at a young age in the war.

The main character of "La Habanera" is played by the Swedisch actress Zarah Leander. While her compatriot and contemporary Greta Garbo went to Hollywood, Zarah Leander became an UFA (German filmstudio) star. She ended up on the wrong side of history. Greta Garbo became an icon, Zarah Leander fell into oblivion.