Mémoires du sous-développement

Memorias del subdesarrolo (memories of the underdeveloped) is a look into the life of a bourgeois young writer who decides to stay in his native Cuba following the Cuban revolution, and enters himself into a life of detachment, seclusion, and avoidance. Sergio (the writer) is juxtaposed with Elna (a young woman following the trends that are dictated to her) to show a clash in idealism, values, and moral that leads to dramatic court scene that ultimately puts in question the current state of Cuba opposed to the past. Alea's use of Sergio, Elena, Pablo (a petty bourgeois that flees to Miami), and the court shows Alea's insight into the great social change that followed the revolution. Through the course of the film you see the change in society that spurns it's, once, culturally elite to become detached from there surroundings and society, leaving only two options: flight, and seclusion. This film is a great look into a society, and a man trying to escape from it. .

If you are inclined to think that Third World Cinema is simplistic and one-dimensional, I invite you see Tomas Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, selected by the New York Times in 1974 as one of the year's ten best movies. Based on the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoës, a Cuban writer who lived in the United States, Memories is a complex and probing film about the dilemma faced by intellectuals in Cuba following the revolution. Although directed by a Cuban who supported the revolution and remained in Cuba until his death, the film has a European sensibility, interlacing fiction and documentary footage and using poetic images, literary narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage reminiscent of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) is a frustrated writer who chooses to remain in Cuba rather than follow his family to Miami just "to see how it all turns out". Though he has strong feelings for his people, he is indifferent towards politics an observer rather than a participant. Alea shows the artist as anti-hero, a man who undergoes an identity crisis, is sapped of all his vitality, feels old in his thirties, and drifts along without meaning and purpose. Unable to write the novel he wants, Sergio survives on rental income from apartments and lives in middle class luxury while around him housing is deteriorating and there are serious gas and oil shortages. He spends his days smoking in bed, looking out of a telescope through his bedroom window, taking walks, watching television, and meeting young women. He makes no pretense of his being an outsider but complains that "everything happens to me too early or too late". Hanna, the woman he says he truly loved urged him to move to New York with her and become a writer but he chose to remain in Cuba to go into the furniture business.

When Sergio makes the acquaintance of Elena (Daisy Granados), a sixteen- year-old girl who wants to be an actress, his life takes on new meaning but it is temporary and the affair ends badly. Persuading her that he knows important people in the theatrical world, he brings her to his apartment and they begin a relationship in which he tries to model her to fit his ideal of the bourgeois Cuban woman. He takes her to modern art galleries and the home of writer Ernest Hemingway to expose her to culture but it doesn't work and he complains when she doesn't fit into his mold. "She doesn't relate to things," he tells himself. "It's one of the signs of underdevelopment." Elena, like other Cuban women", he says, has an "inability to relate to things, to accumulate experience, to develop", but the stricture can just as easily refer to himself and he pays the price of this experience when the girl's parents bring a lawsuit against him for rape. Although he escapes the fate of a criminal, little by little the outside world, the world of guns, slogans, and rallies closes in on him and he feels trapped.

There are several documentary sequences interspersed throughout the film that have no apparent connection to the narrative but convey the sense that no one living in revolutionary Cuba is able to escape the presence of history. The opening sequence shows a public dance in which all the participants are black with the exception of Sergio who is white. In this sequence continued later in the film, an unnamed political leader is assassinated. In other footage, we see excerpts from the trial of counterrevolutionaries captured at Playa Giron, the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and a third in which we hear the voices of Castro and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis.

Though Alea apparently wants us to see the fate that befalls someone who does not directly endorse revolutionary activities, he makes his character so appealing and sympathetic that, to me, the film had mixed messages. I was torn between my support of the aims of the revolution and empathizing with Sergio's disdain for the emptiness of both the Cuban bourgeois and the revolutionary leadership. An event that took place only three years after Memories of Underdevlopment was released, however, underscored the point that Sergio was making. At that time, Castro, at the First National Congress on Education and Culture, said that artists and writers must reject "all manifestations of a decadent culture, the fruit of societies that are rent by contradictions". Not surprisingly, although due to receive a special prize for the film from the U.S. National Society of Film Critics in 1973, Gutiérrez Alea was denied a visa to attend the ceremony.

"Memorias del Subdesarrollo" (1968) is an extremely interesting Cuban film about an aspiring bourgeois writer named Sergio. His wife leaves him for a more secure life in the States, as do many of his friends and neighbors. But Sergio remains in Cuba, all the while detesting his "underdeveloped" countrymen. His interior monologue throughout the film details the numerous ways in which the people who surround him, and his new girlfriend, are all underdeveloped mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, but we soon realize that it is the smooth-talking Sergio who is guilty of underdevelopment. Perhaps his inability to leave the mediocrity of Cuba is rooted in his need to have others to look down upon. Intermixed with his observations is a visit he takes to Hemingway's retreat in which he contemplates the novelist's colonialism--yet we can't but wonder if his observations are tainted by his underdevelopment. Further, the Cuban missile crisis happens at this time, and Sergio must also deal with a rape charge. A challenging film.

"Memories of Underdevelopment" (Cuban, 1968): Made in 1968, set and shot (b/w) in 1961-62 Cuba, using a frighteningly smooth blend of documentary footage, and flash-backs, with new sets, locations, and actors in present-time, we watch a man at an airport say goodbye to most everyone he's ever known. THEY are escaping the new Castro Cuba, to start over in Miami, USA. HE has decided to remain (although we're never given much of an explanation why), and use (what must be) his independent wealth. Now living in the big city with only strangers, he wanders about looking for relationships. Instant closeness. Replacements. Although carrying the demeanor of a suave, patient, aging bachelor, he has the desperation of a teenage boy, driven by appearances and hormones. As archival footage is used to expand the vision of Castro's Cuba, it is clear the lonely man is the one making the bigger mistake. I thought of this "story" as Emotionally Existential.

There are some great comments and facts here about this gem and I'll try not to repeat them. Alea presents a realistic, fascinating, and believable dramatization of the moral and political quagmire set in the early-Castro era through the POV of an apathetic bourgeois. The story delves into the inner psyche of Sergio, a lonely eccentric and sets out to illustrate its impact during the alienation on every level intertwined by transitioning culture at that time. He gets caught up in a relationship with Elena, their happiness seems perfect.

Alea elaborates this predictable story in which, from the beginning, the idea is built that something does not fully agree with what Sergio think will happen. The narration submerges you in the timeline and slowly seams things together in a brilliant and subtle way. I have always enjoyed this film minute by minute, the upheavals and the disappoints that happens to break the character mentally. The film is shot in semi-documentary style which is one of the highlights as it pushes the narrative with no room for spoon-fed character development. Even with limited emphasis on traditional storytelling the film carries emotional impact with solid acting effort throughout the runtime. Some may look at it from the view of art-house documentary with newsreel footage of the Cuban Revolution dressed up as a political drama, but it is more than that. Also, I will recommend Stefan Uher's The Sun in a Net (1963), Halina Bielinska's Sam posród miasta (1965), Paulo César Saraceni The Dare (1966), The Vampires of Poverty (1977), The Man Who Sleeps (1974) and Ice (1970). If you haven't seen it, I would suggest you do add it in your watch list.

To conclude Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) is simply a brilliant character analysis, also a cleverly constructed political drama realised in a time where the facts truly are in your face.