cuba

Viva Cuba (Director: Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti, Cuba, 2005): Viva Cuba is a charming fairytale/road movie that sub­merges its polit­ical mes­sage in a very per­sonal story of friend­ship and love. Jorgito and his tomboy friend Malu are on the cusp of adoles­cence, and their close friend­ship seems about to morph into some­thing at once more ser­ious and more fright­ening. It’s evident from the way they can be holding hands one minute and arguing viol­ently the next. To make things worse, their fam­ilies detest each other. Malu lives with her mother, a bitter woman whose family used to wield influ­ence in the days before Castro’s revolu­tion. Jorgito’s par­ents have moved to Havana from the coun­tryside and are firm sup­porters of the gov­ern­ment. Each mother admon­ishes her child for playing with an unsuit­able play­mate, but that only drives the pair closer together.

This Romeo and Juliet story really takes off when Malu’s mother decides to leave Cuba forever, to join her boy­friend in what we assume is America. In order to get per­mis­sion to leave the country with Malu, she must get her estranged ex-husband to sign an exit author­iz­a­tion. Knowing this, Malu and Jorgito hatch a plan to appeal to his paternal love (or guilt) by trav­eling in person to see him. The problem is that Malu hasn’t seen her father since she was six, because he works as a light­house keeper at the other end of the country.

The two young prot­ag­on­ists hit the road by train, bus, and oxcart to reach their des­tin­a­tion, but their con­stant squab­bling threatens to ruin the plan. In the mean­time, their wor­ried fam­ilies have seem­ingly recon­ciled in the des­perate search for their missing children.

First and fore­most, this is a beautifully-shot film, and the use of colour is often striking. The polit­ical mes­sage, such as it is, seems to ignore Castro com­pletely; instead, it’s a shame­lessly pro-Cuba film, high­lighting both the island’s nat­ural beauty as well as the fierce pride of its people in their cul­tural insti­tu­tions. It’s not sur­prising that music plays a big part in the film.

It’s unclear whether the dir­ector was attempting to make a film aimed solely at chil­dren. There is cer­tainly a sense of naïveté in the dia­logue and the basic struc­ture of the film, and there is never any real danger to these two kids on the run, but the ending seemed par­tic­u­larly grown-up and ambiguous, and made me ree­valuate my ini­tial impres­sions. Some critics have seen the film as an allegory depicting two sides to modern Cuban cul­ture, but I don’t believe the inten­tion was that obvious. I think the film gains res­on­ance from refusing to be overt about its polit­ical opin­ions. Instead, it leaves the viewer to untangle his sym­pathies from the inter­sec­tion of con­flicting desires in a country that is chan­ging, just not fast enough for some.

Note: Film Movement fea­tured this film as their Year 5 Film 5.

(8/10)

Tagged as: adolescence, children, cuba, DVD, DVD Clubs, Film Movement, road-movie

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