Memorias del subdesarrollo
Opisy(1)
This film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is the most widely renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. After his wife and family flee in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) passes his days wandering Havana in idle reflection, his amorous entanglements and political ambivalence gradually giving way to a mounting sense of alienation. With this adaptation of an innovative novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Gutiérrez Alea developed a cinematic style as radical as the times he was chronicling, creating a collage of vivid impressions through the use of experimental editing techniques, archival material, and spontaneously shot street scenes. Intimate and densely layered, Memories of Underdevelopment provides a biting indictment of its protagonist’s disengagement and an extraordinary glimpse of life in postrevolutionary Cuba. (Criterion)
(więcej)Recenzje (3)
A film that is interesting in its form, whether in its fictional or documentary parts, is primarily an interesting testimony of what Cuba was like in the 60s and before, and how it developed. But it is also a testimony that it doesn't really matter what the regime is like, because there will always be people who will be quite unhappy about it.
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The comparison with the French New Wave is indeed appropriate, not only in terms of the impressive form. When the main character, in one of his reflections on contemporary society, remembers that Havana was once called the Paris of the Caribbean, he does not realize that he himself could be Paris. I am referring to Parisian films about characters filled with anxiety, loneliness, and weariness from themselves, as captured by, for example, Varda in Cleo from 5 to 7 or Malle in The Fire Within. Alea also creates a modern representative of unnecessary people, but unlike his European counterparts, he does not allow his protagonist to gradually experience disgust with his life, but rather suddenly. The Cuban Revolution invades the lives of the local bourgeoisie quickly and clearly, and a choice must be made - either flee the country or escape from one's own existing self. 1) In that regard, the film is optimistic - the times allow the protagonist to give up a life that he himself has already seen as mostly unnecessary and condemnable, and unlike his European counterparts, he has the opportunity, mediated by a fundamental social change. 2) In that regard, the film is pessimistic - those who expect a schematic awakening of the bourgeois and their embrace by the people will be disappointed; the main character never holds back on many criticisms of Cuba until the end. In any case, it is a brilliant and unique film about which it cannot be said unequivocally whether its message is ultimately optimistic or not (which is clearly the purpose, because Alea wanted to end the film with suicide in one of the original versions of the script, which would have greatly narrowed the final resonance of the film). Personally, I think that yes, by remaining on the island, the protagonist decides to participate in the fate of the entire nation, his criticisms are justified, and they serve (or the film actually served at the time) as a challenge to the inhabitants to convince the bourgeoisie and the whole world that they can change culturally after having changed politically.
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On the one hand, the silent and unhappy battle of a bourgeois intellectual for his position in a changed world is breathtaking in its palpable, subjective documentation of Cuban post-revolutionary everyday life; on the other hand, it's consistently irritating with an unbearably aggrieved protagonist. He gives the impression that his choice to remain alone in communist Cuba is motivated only by taking a vacation from his duties as an intellectual, which he spends bitterly glossing over the surrounding futility. And that’s supposed to be my project.
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