Miel para Oshún

A Cuban American returns to Cuba in search for his long-lost mother. But his bags, alas, do not contain a hearing aid for director Humberto Solas, who's tone deaf for dialogue. Nor a Dictionary of American Slang, so his protagonist can use the right cuss words in English. Otherwise, in Spanish, he sounds as corny as a blurb on a romance novel's cover.

In exchange for a few politically incorrect venial sins, Mr. Solas delivers the neo-official party line, where only Cubans on the island know who they really are (despite "everything"), while Miami Cubans have to marry an American to get any respect. Are you sure? In Miami?!

Before Miel para Oshun, Mr. Solas handn't made a movie in a decade. Who said it was better to let sleeping dogs lie? Well, lie he did.

The movie had some good moments. The acting (especially the taxi driver) is decent. The view of the Cuban landscape, from one end of the country to the other, is, at times, delightful. The movie well evokes the yearning and pain of exile and the joy of reunion.

But, oh, oh, did the pace have to be so glacial?! I screened the movie with the idea of showing it in class (I'm a high school Spanish teacher). After about 15 minutes, I could easily imagine the entire class with their faces on their desks, sound asleep. Not good! Even the bleeping credits crawled across the screen for about fifteen minutes at the beginning of the film, soon becoming an annoying distraction.

And the central premise of the film...that Roberto "doesn't know who he is" because he's neither Cuban nor American...is completely ridiculous. There are about 100,000 other Cuban-American men just like Roberto in Miami who know exactly who they are. And the idea that a Cuban has to marry an American in the U.S. in order to get respect is just laughable. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Cubans here who are married to other Cubans or other Latinos and are doing just fine, thanks.

I guess this has to be seen as a movie that "could have been."

An exiled Cuban goes back to his motherland, 32 years after he was taken to the USA by his father. We witness a return to the roots, as in Alejo Carpentier's classic story. We also witness a road movie, a subtle love story and a mural of Cuban life, in an overall nice little film.

Only the ideological premise on which the film is built is fake. Social criticism of the situation in Cuba is minimum (yet, it is barely at the acceptance level of the bureaucrats who rule the island). If a bike is stolen, it is by a thief who has been in jail; if buildings are half-destroyed, they are being repaired; if a the neighbor is a "jinetera", it's because she wants to leave the country; if the characters are sent wrongly to jail, everything settles finely a few hours later. No hunger (even smiling children with ice creams), no police State who represses santeros, all the houses nicely decorated. We only get one blackout and several transportation problems.

And the key of the film -Roberto's unhappiness because he is at the US where he doesn't belong, in contrast with the "happy" islanders- is impossible to sustain. In the most important scene, in the middle of a town plaza, surrounded by locals, Roberto claims he's unhappy because he's a nowhere man. If that was to happen in the real Cuba, tens of people would tell him: "You can worry about your existential problems because you have three meals a day!", to say the least.

We don't know what happened to Roberto. But I can bet that, if this tormented character decided to stay in Cuba, with his mother, his cousin and his regained roots, he'd regret it loudly.

The direction is feeble at times (is this the same Solás of "Lucía"?), the audio is terrible, but the music is super, some scenes are very good (the Santera, the arrival of the mother) and some of the acting is great (I particularly enjoyed Limonta's portrait of a typical Cuban cab driver)

I wasn't sure what to expect and for the first 35 minutes or so I thought the film was going to be pure melodrama. But once the film got going I realized that this film is a look at one of the many cruel realities that both Cuban's and Cuban-American's face everyday, the loss of family and self. I thought the picture painted of Cuba and it's government was not overly critical. I was amazed, having been to Cuba myself and seeing the government control that this film was allowed to be shot, in that there were certain subtle criticisms of the government. Overall I thought the film was very well made and acted. If anything it certainly shows Cuba from Havana to the countryside. I do feel however that the almost romance between the lead character and his cousin was unnecessary and did nothing to improve the movie.

The first time I watched the film, I wasn't that impressed, but I watched it again and realized that there's a lot more to it. Solas uses melodrama as a vehicle to explore the pain that Cuban exiles feel when they come back to the island, but it's a very restrained form of melodrama and a lot of the changes the main character, Roberto (Jorge Perugorría) undergoes are subtle. It takes time for someone to change a lifetime of thinking and learn to see the past in a different light. The pace may seem slow compared to Hollywood films, but this really isn't a light romantic comedy. It has moments of humor and fun, but essentially it's a serious drama about the search for identity. Perugorría does a great job of portraying the uptight, emotionally crippled Roberto, and it's great to see him loosen up and become more "Cuban" once he gets to the island. Pilar and Antonio are fantastic characters who help him understand more about life in Cuba. He realizes everything he's missed by growing up in the U.S. and not sharing the same fate as Cubans on the island. He gives up his starched shirts and rental cars and ends up riding bikes and hitchhiking like everyone else. He leaves the five star hotel in Havana and sleeps in the huts where country people live. You can literally see him transforming himself into someone else as he moves through the film. This film doesn't show Cuba in overly romantic terms, but it's a pretty realistic and intelligent look at what it means to be Cuban. Roberto isn't as likeable as some of the characters Perugorría has played in other films, but I think that just shows the range of Perugorría's talents. We don't have to love Roberto to sympathize with him.