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.

If you want to see a melodramatic love story, see The Notebook [2004]. This film should be seen for its stereotypical portrayal of non-Aryan people. After all, the film was made in Germany at a time when spurious theories of racial superiority were being concocted by the leaders of Nazism. The moral of the story is that a Nordic woman should never dare to marry or get involved with anyone not from her own race because she will be victimized in the process. In the end, the nobler northerners get it their way against the weaker southerners. This is so even when an argument could be made that don Pedro was simply the victim of a typical pattern of racism for ten very long years. In fact, he couldn't even teach his son Juan to love the culture of San Juan because his mother brainwashed him to long for snow in the middle of the Caribbean. Hard as he tried, don Pedro could not overcome the iron-will of his wife. In hindsight, should the story be true, the ones making a grave mistake are the arrogant people who go back to Sweden before the outbreak of World War 2.

Zarah Leander was to German cinema of the 1930s what Garbo and Dietrich together were to Hollywood. She physically suggested Garbo and had the same deep, Swedish-accented voice. Unlike Garbo, and much like Dietrich, she often sang in her films while swathed in baroque costumes and tons of makeup and curlicued coiffures so as to convey an extreme artificiality. La Habanera, stylishly directed by Detlef Sierk (the future Douglas Sirk) and beautifully shot is the perfect vehicle for this lush romantic vision of the tropics.

Astree, a young Swede, travels to Puerto Rico with her bilious old aunt, is so enraptured by the tropical atmosphere and the attentions of a local Don (Ferdinand Marian) that she jumps ship to stay there. Ten years later, she's miserable in the remorseless heat and torpidity, crushed by the realization that she made an impulsive mistake, married a man she didn't love and now is sentenced to remain trapped and homesick. Her only consolation is her son whom she estranges from his father, spoiling him, doting on him and singing him twee songs with lyrics about snowflakes on nose tips intertwined with melodic recitations of the letters of the alphabet. One would hope that by the age of 9 the boy would be ready for something a bit more advanced. A parallel plot line involves two Swedish scientists who travel to the island to research and develop a vaccine for the "Puerto Rico Fever" which blows in annually on a "fever wind" and sends people into comas from which they never emerge. The powerful Don does not want the world to think infectious fevers exist on the island – hurts business. So he connives to sabotage their efforts.

Throughout the story the haunting but kitschy title song by Lothar Bruhne and Bruno Balz is sung by various groups of "natives," used as underscoring and in a climactic scene, performed to the hilt by Leander and a Caribbean orchestra in one of most rapturous musical sequences of 1930's filmdom.

Threaded through the plot are criticisms of the United States (via the Rockefeller Institute and a sly dig at President Roosevelt) and a suggestion that Nordic types are better off with their own kind. The depiction of Puerto Rico is pure fantasy, but no worse than the usual Hollywood image of Latin America of the period.

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.