kinaidos

Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual living off of (seemingly tenuous) rental income as a property holder, decides to stay in Cuba. The conflict set up between his intellectual convictions and the reality of Cuban life in the wake of the revolution makes up the central problem of the film. The film presents a year in the life of the protagonist, a year culminating in the missile crises of 1962. What makes the film is the candid nature of it's reflections on the role of the intellectual in political life - certainly THE hot topic during the summer of 1968. The film is also a stylistic tour de force, welding together neorealistic drama, newsreel footage, montages of life in contemporary Havana as seen from Sergio's flat (through a telescope), and some filmed Shavian-styled debates amid the action. Far from being a typical propaganda piece, the films treatment of the future of the revolution was very open ended, candid, and thoughtful. It's a film that emerges from the debates about the future and which stages it's own participation in that debate. The film features two significant cameos: Edmundo Desnoes - the author of the novel on which the film is based, and Gutierez Alea himself. Both cameos occur in diegetic reflections about art: a debate about literature in the case of Desnoes, and a talk with a young director in the case of Alea. This film is almost impossible to find in the US thanks to the Cuban expatriate zealot nonsense. It's available in Mexico though - on a fairly well mastered DVD. It's worth seeking out. It's one of the best Cuban films ever and one of the greatest films of the new wave era.

First off, this is a 30 hour mini-series broadcast on Mexican television in the late 80s. The unedited series is presented in the boxed DVD set. The story covers the history of the second phase of the Mexican revolution from the presidency of Carranza through that of Cardenas. The historical novella is fictionalized by presenting the story through the eyes of the family and acquaintances of a general who somehow manages to stay close enough to the powers that be throughout to provide a window into the whirlwind of Mexican politics at the time. This is valuable piece of historical fiction because it provides the viewer with a good picture of how educated Mexicans tend to perceive their own history. The fictional family at the center of the story helps provide a bit of relief from what would otherwise be a rather dry and complicated journey through the twists and turns of the latter years of the Mexican revolution. The writers actually do a pretty good job of working the fiction and the history together, presenting most of the drama at times when the history is moving a bit more slowly. The DVD transfer is poor quality. I don't know if the series was filmed or taped, but the image on the DVD is of extremely poor resolution with a great deal of digital conversion artifacts. The score is terrible. Production value throughout is mediocre to bad. The writing and the acting and the concept make the series valuable, in spite of these shortcomings. The series is readily available throughout Mexico (e.g. Sanborns, Walmart). It is not subtitled in any language.

The film is a bit tedious. It's mostly a silent film, with the bulk o the story provided through a series of voice-overs. While making a silent film like this is not such a bad idea, this is one of those films where the lack of dialog and the repetitive early scenes make it simply tedious. You don't understand the reason for the tedium until well into the picture, and by then it's too late. The first 40 minutes of film is something of a slow piece of Mexican soft porn, and unimaginative soft porn at that. Later in the film the style of the first 40 minutes starts to makes sense, but it's too late, because by then the audience is lost. There is some nice location shooting at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. I've often wondered why more films aren't shot there. The campus is built on the edge of lava fields that lend the campus a very otherworldly feel. My biggest problem with the film is that the director/writer has made the film the way he wanted to see it without regard for how a viewer who doesn't know the story will view it. You can't ignore the audience when you tell a story.