Guantanamera

A small look at life in Cuba, "Guantanamera" portrays a world-famous Cuban singer returning to her hometown and suddenly dying. Her funeral procession reveals several things about the people involved, namely the love-starved existence of a woman sick of her creepy husband.

Obviously, we in the United States only get to hear about Cuba occasionally, so at the very least this movie should provide some insight into the state of affairs there (or just to hear the Cuban dialect, with its dropping of esses). But anything looking at people's individuals lives and how policies have affected them gets praise from me. We see how people have to abide by food rationing, among other things (of course, this is mainly due to the US blockade against the island). So I recommend this film.

As pure entertainment, the film does seem scattered and unfocused. However, it packs in many social, political and cultural messages on different levels. For instance, as the characters enter Bayamo, we hear a tour guide telling of Bayamo as historical center for smuggling and how this motivated rebellious action against colonial Spain. I took this as a commentary about present-day Cuba. The film is filled with metaphors, starting, of course, with the plot: a former economics teacher falls in love with a trucker and leaves her crass, heartless, bureaucrat husband. To really enjoy this movie, you have to understand that it is a report on the state of the country, and the characters and plot serve to veil documentary as movie fiction. Knowledge about recent Cuban history certainly helps understanding the movie, though, and you may want to see other films or read about present-day Cuba first.

If you care about the evolution of thinking regarding social organization, you will necessarily have to go through the biggest fracture in the post-ww2 world. the iron curtain. it's up to you making your own opinion regarding what each side had to offer, and which sides on each side you support. To help you make up your mind you have to rely on the stories told by those who lived in the flesh the problems and advantages of those worlds. I mean the honest thinkers, or people with honest stories to tell. If you deepen your research on the soviet branch of the curtain, you will necessarily face the cuban case. It's a fascinating story. And within that story, there are a few honest storytellers. Korda, and Gutierrez-Alea are the most meaningful, they work with images. But while Korda is fundamentally important because he followed the process, the revolution, Gutierrez is someone who was at the beginning, and kept telling his honest version of the reality until his death. Just before that, he made this beautiful film.

So, we know we will watch in his films the narrative of someone who never ceased to make questions, and denounce what he believed was bad, as much as he had denounced the pre-Castro abuses, and as much as he had genuinely embraced the revolution. This is his vision, in the mid 90'. Disenchanted, cynic, ironic. Few times has the road-trip been so metaphorical, so invested with the notion of journey, through time(s), hardly through physical space. Also you can invest any symbolic weight to the corpse they transport. But what i care about is the pure talent Alea had as a true cinematic storyteller. My bet is that he started with images, loose disconnected images that he wanted to pass. Just like the final shot in this film. Than he worked hard on building a narrative structure than could competently, coherently and, y say, poetically, integrate all his multiple visions. The fun thing about his film is that the multiplicity of visions from the same beautiful mind is reflected in the various story lines we follow, each with its own tone, and mode. We have the soap opera story that surrounds the funny life of Mariano, multiple women that mean sex, to him, and one platonic love, reluctant to be consumed. We have the cynic critic to the regime totally invested in the stupidity of the whole funeral service business. That business about inventing rules to spare fuel; all that represented by the frigid bureaucratic husband, a sad portrait to a by now (and than) sad system. Than the heaviest drama falls upon the most delicate soul in the living characters, the old widow, husband to a late artist, the one who never ceases to care about people, eventually the one true love in the story (i'm not sure to consider the teacher a woman in love). Alea doesn't spare on the cynic posture, so the black humour with the corpse, near the end, really grows an uneasy feel on you. All these lines are perfectly integrated by a well managed road trip, and a good adaptation of an eternal song, which incidentally is an avatar for the cuban soul.

This is like an Italian post-modern "sweet" film, but better, because it is more meaningful.

My opinion: 4/5

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Guantanamera, a Cuban light drama by accomplished director Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1928-1996), is a tropical road movie. The setting is the 1990s, following withdrawal of USSR support for its little-brother Communist regime. A woman dies, some distance removed from Havana, and the goal is to transport her to the capital for burial. A tiny entourage of family accompanies the hearse.

Some snippets, though not central to the plot: How do government-run funeral homes work exactly, in a Communist country? Well, first, there is a per-person quota of refreshments for the bereaved and acquaintances who are paying last respects. But doesn't this attract inauthentic freeloaders? Second, there is a scene involving a meeting of regional mortuary-manager bureaucrats. If travel expenses for hearse trips are allocated according to the relative mileage of the territories through which vehicles traipse, the funeral home functionary in a crossroads region takes more than her share of budgetary hits. Is that fair? Third, there is the question of why the burial in Havana in the first place. If everybody and everywhere in Cuba are socialistically equal, what's wrong with the deceased staying put where she was? Meanwhile, we also have organized hitchhiking. Officials have the power to commandeer vacant seats from those who have for those who need.

There is some Latino romance, and some lightly subversive free enterprise. All in all, a likable movie. Mirta Ibarra, who starred twelve years earlier in Alea's 1983 film, Up To a Certain Point, gets an encore. She plays the niece of the deceased, who is also the wife of the over-serious Daniel Ortega-looking official who's in charge of the expedition.

The movie seems ambitious in its elements - a satire of bureaucratic Cuba (via the red tape associated with cross-country funeral delivery arrangements), frequent broad comedy (mainly in the truck driver's entanglements with his various women), much romantic wistfulness as the old man deals with a life largely wasted through lack of courage and Gina realizes the aridity of her marriage to Alonzo, within which her own creativity is stifled; the economic and cultural diversity of Cuba sketched in bits and pieces along the way. As executed, the overall framework for all of this - that of a loosely structured road movie - sets the tone more fully than might have been advisable: the rhythm reflects the leisurely procession along the road and the jauntily resigned renditions of the title song, which makes for good but not very provocative entertainment. The film seems to look back more than forward, with a pervasive sense of quiet nostalgia and regret about it, although there's also a gentle postivism that things can be overcome (with no thanks to the political infrastructure, it subtly suggests).