LAFF 2012: THE STRAWBERRY TREE



A scene from The Strawberry Tree.

Cut this crap

By Ed Rampell

Much to its credit, LAFF, which highlighted Cuban films during last year’s festival, is screening more motion pictures from Cuba, which since the Revolution has produced numerous significant cinematic works. Unfortunately, Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s 2011 The Strawberry Tree is definitely not one of them. The word “cut!” does not appear to be in the vocabulary of this Italian filmmaker, who speaks limited English. Using a cinema verite type technique, he lets his subjects -- Cubans living in a north coast fishing village -- meander on and on as Casanova simply lets his camera roll.

During a LAFF 2012 post-screening Q&A the director defended his approach, saying: “I can’t stand fast cutting films. I can’t think. Someone is thinking for me.” But I’d ask: What was he thinking when his characters framed in a single camera angle (often unusually set) blabbed and tinkered on and on; and when Casanova was in the editing room?

To be fair, The Strawberry Tree does has an anthropological sensibility, as it reveals the lifestyle of these fishing villagers, who seem almost completely untouched by the Cuban Revolution (although there’s evidence that they have been educated, a hallmark achievement of the Revolution), socialism and indeed, by the 21^st century. (There is a sort of windmill, but like most in this elliptical film, what it is and its purpose is never explained to viewers who are supposed to be mind readers.) These Cubans live in a village with thatched huts and live largely off of the sea. Nobody is seen going to what we Westerners would conventionally consider a “job”, although they do plenty of manual labor, grinding coffee, thatching roofs, killing and skinning goats, etc. One character repairs a punctured tire using a condom (here, the rubber literally meets the road!).

The Strawberry Tree reminded me of the Samoan villages I lived in during the late 1970s. (BTW, you know the difference between “anthropology” and “sociology”, don’t you? The former is the study of brown, Black and yellow people; the latter is the study of white people.) So I asked the filmmaker what he thought of Robert Flaherty, who shot Moana of the South Seas in Samoa during the 1920s. This Casanova has no love for the renowned director of other classics, such as Nanook of the North, saying he “hates” Flaherty, because “he’s faking everything.” This is a common critique of Flaherty by critics who take the reputed documentarian to task because he often allegedly filmed scripted reenactments he fobbed off as “real life” (sound familiar, “reality TV”?). Fair enough, but unlike Casanova, Flaherty not only knew how to shout “cut!”, but had a sense of story, style, innovative use of film stocks such as panchromatic film, and of that little something called editing.

The main value and virtue of Casanova’s inanely titled strawberry statement is that it has preserved forever on video the lifestyle of the inhabitants of the fishing village of Juan Antonio which, shortly after Casanova wrapped, was wiped out by a hurricane. There’s also a simply stunning underwater shot -- although Casanova seems far more interested in the fish than in his human subjects. But that’s to be expected from a doc that’s simply for the birds, and the worst film I’ve ever seen at LAFF. Cut!


The Strawberry Tree screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival, June 19, 9:50 p.m., Regal Cinemas.

  

 

  

  

 

LALIFF 2011: LOS 100 SONES CUBANOS

 Roberto Garcia in Los 100 Sonos Cubanos.

Sound of ages

By Ed Rampell

The documentary, Los 100 Sones Cubanos, is one of those rare works of art that simply makes you feel glad to be alive, if for no reason other than to be able to behold experiences like watching it. Los 100 Sones Cubanos is about a “beloved genre” of distinctly, endemically Cuban music, with origins stretching back to the Bantus in Africa, Spaniards in Andalusia, and the Canary Islands -- and can these songbirds warble like canaries. Musicians use instruments ranging from bungas (tree trunks covered with deerskin) to bamboo sticks to organs “tropicalized” by Cuban maestros from the Sierra Maestra Mountains and beyond.

In Los 100 Sones Cubanos writers-directors Edesio Alejandro and Ruben Consuegra are more successful as the Los 100 Sones Cubanos form of musical expression, rather than a musician per se, serves as the protagonist, moving the storyline along, as the filmmakers travel around Cuba filming a variety bands and singers who specialize in this music. Along the way we encounter astute, highly educated Cuban pop culture-ologists who tell us about the music, claiming that mambo, cha-cha and more are derived from Los 100 Sones Cubanos. 

Man (and woman!) in the street interviews provide some comic relief, even as they reveal the soul of an animated, attuned, aware people. Among the musicians we meet are Benny Villay, whose duds are a cross between Zoot suit and cowboy couture, and who croons (among other things) songs made famous by Benny More (whom a Cuban biopic, El Benny, was made in 2006). But my favorite crooner is 92-year-old Don Eduardo, who actually puts maracas in the back of his shoes in order to enhance the beat. 

Los 100 Sones Cubanos serves to remind us about the major impact on and contribution to world music Cuban sounds have made. 

LALIFF 2011: CHICO & RITA

A scene from Chico Y Rita.

True-ba-loney

By Ed Rampell 

Chico & Rita is another Cuban-music themed film, although it is actually an animated feature, not a doc, co-directed/co-written by Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (director of 1992’s Belle Epoque starring Penelope Cruz).

Chico & Rita's animation is stellar, vividly bringing to life the Havana, Manhattan, Paris and Las Vegas of the 1940s/1950s. The music, too, makes this film worth seeing. However, the script leaves much to be desired. The Havana of bygone days looks glamorous, especially in comparison to today’s Cuban capital, which looks drab and shabby. Well, half a century of embargo may or may not do that to you, but the film's Havana of yesterday is largely devoid of that grinding poverty that inspired, oh you know, that little thing we call “revolution.” It wasn’t all mambo and showgirls under Cuban dictator and U.S. puppet Fulgencio Batista, don’tchaknow?

The love story between a pianist and singer is also remarkably stupid and senseless, full of celluloid stereotypes and completely absent of the sense of the ongoing bond a romantic relationship can generate between two people. The movie’s notion of love is, well, cartoonish; there’s a big difference between true, lasting love and obsession, don’tchaknow? 

But again, having said this, if you can overlook these points Chico & Rita is a fiesta for the eyes and ears, with some of the most compelling cartoon, animated erotic imagery since R. Crumb and Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 Fritz the Cat.  

LALIFF 2011: CUBAN FILMS

A scene from Chico & Rita.

Cubatopia

By Ed Rampell

The 15^th annual Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival is taking place in Hollywood through July 25, and the Hispanic-oriented film fete is screening a number of Cuban features and documentaries this year. They include: The nonfiction works Los 100 Sones Cubanos (100 Cuban Songs); the nonfiction, hip-hop themed Revolution about El Band Aldo, which, according to LALIFF, is censored in Cuba; the surfing doc, Havana Surf; the animated feature with music, Chico & Rita; and Boleto a Paraiso (Ticket to Paradise).

Director/co-writer Gerardo Chijona’s unforgettable, riveting Ticket to Paradise helps to redefine so-called “socialist realism,” which, under the Stalinists, was often neither “socialist” nor “realist,” but frequently propagandistic in the crudest sense Instead of brawny proletarians and peasants riding shiny tractors in a workers’ paradise, viewers of the ironically named Ticket to Paradise will see images of: AIDS, prostitution, drug use, suicide, sexual abuse/ incest, crime, homosexuality, graphic nudity, sex acts, homelessness, dumpster diving, alienated youth, underground heavy metal concerts, Cuba’s counterculture, etc.

The feature is set during the 1990s’ so-called “Special Period,” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Cuba lost its greatest economic supporters, Havana’s U.S.S.R. and Comecon East Bloc allies, the socialist David still had to contend with that Yanqui Goliath only 90 miles away. 

A Spanish-Cuban co-production made with the participation of the official ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos), Ticket to Paradise is far more hard hitting than any Hollywood, theatrically released feature dealing with AIDS, teen sexuality, etc., I can think of, including 2003’s powerful Thirteen, starring Holly Hunter as a beleaguered mom of a teen gone wild. 

If there is a propagandistic element to the frank Ticket to Paradise it could be in the depiction of these excellent medical facilities, with their motivated, benevolent doctors and nurses, which reminded me of the New Deal camp the Joad family visited in the 1940 John Ford classic, The Grapes of Wrath. Even during the severe deprivations during the depths of the Special Period revolutionary Cubans somehow provided free healthcare for the least of those amongst them -- something bourgeois America has yet to do.

The ensemble cast delivers powerhouse performances, notably Miriel Cejas as Eunice, the runaway teen sexually molested by her father, and her longhaired boyfriend Alejandro (Hector Medina). Chijona deftly directs them and has created a searing cinematic work reminiscent and in the best tradition of the self critical trend of Cuban cinema, as exemplified by Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s 1968 classic, Memories of Underdevelopment. Like his motion picture predecessor, Chijona has made a most memorable movie, one that further develops, refines and redefines socialist realism.

Hopefully, the senseless 50-year-old blockade and embargoof Cuba will end soon so, among many other reasons, American moviegoers can have the right to buy tickets to see more great films, like Ticket to Paradise.  

  

  

 

LAFF 2011: SPOTLIGHT ON CUBA

A scene from Ticket to Paradise.

The revolution shall be screened

By Ed Rampell

The Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) is currently taking place (mostly) in Downtown Los Angeles through June 26, and this year’s multitude of movies includes the program, International Spotlight: Cuba.

Featuring four features and documentaries, complementing, but actually separate from this year’s spotlight on Cuban cinema, is the world premiere of Unfinished Spaces, which is actually in the Documentary Competition and made by Yanqui filmmakers Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray.

Unfinished Spaces is the amazing true story of the ongoing struggle to build the Cuban National Arts Schools. According to the documentary, the idea for the schools emerged shortly after the revolution, when Commandantes Fidel Castro and Che Guevara showed up unannounced at Havana’s poshest country club to play a round of golf, a sport of the idle rich. While on the manicured links a light bulb was illuminated above Castro’s head, and full of revolutionary zeal, he decided that instead of being an aristocratic preserve for the high and mighty, the country club should be transformed into not one, but five schools for the arts – theatre, dance, painting, music, etc. – that would train a new generation of artists to give shape to and express the revolution. “Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world,” Castro declared in 1961. 

Half a century later, that school dreamt up by Castro remains to be completed, and its trial and tribulations have been tied to the ebbs and flows of the Cuban Revolution. The three architects -- the Cuban Ricardo Porro and the Italian transplants Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi -- envisioned avante garde forms in order to literally give shape to Castro’s commission and to the Revolution itself. However, this emphasis on style fell out of favor as “formalism” was eschewed and Cuba grew increasingly allied with the Soviet Union, in favor of Stalinist style architecture that emphasized function instead of aesthetics. Of course, economics played a role, and during periods of hardship funding was cut for the schools. Most recently, hurricanes halted construction and restoration efforts.

Nevertheless, throughout its ups and downs the schools have trained generations of Cuban artists, even as the jungle threatened to reclaim the campuses and turn the site into something similar to ancient ruins. Castro’s personal role in the development of the schools is intriguing and late in the film Castro surprisingly reappears.

Unfinished Spaces examines the role of the revolutionary artist in the Revolution. It is something of a cautionary tale: In the heady early days of revolutions, flush with Promethean victory, anything seems possible. Toward the beginning of the documentary we see Castro, Guevara and the guerrillas triumphantly enter Havana, and there’s the sense that a new millennium will be ushered in. But revolutions, alas, have their Thermidors, their setbacks and even reversals. The saga of the schools and of the architects who designed them reflects this process.

At the world premiere of Unfinished Spaces in the Regal Cinemas at L.A. LIVE the three companeros were reunited, and after seeing the finished film for the first time the architects participated in a Q&A session in the packed theater. Although they are now senior citizens, they called to mind the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s saying: “There’s no grey hair in my soul." 

As part of its International Spotlight series, LAFF is also screening a feature about (and made on location in) Cuba, co-writer/director Fina Torres’ sexy comedy with liberal doses of magical realism, Habana Eva. The Venezuela-born Torres is quite an accomplished filmmaker, who previously made the 2000 Penelope Cruz pic, Woman on Top, 1995’s Celestial Clockwork and 1985’s Oriana. 

Screened during last year's Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Habana Eva is the tale of Eva (Prakriti Maduro), a Cuban seamstress who has her designs on becoming a haute couture fashion designer, but her entrepreneurial flair and initiative is stifled by a factory bureaucrat in this parable of the dilemmas facing contemporary Cuba under Raul, not Fidel, Castro. Eva is wooed by two lovers – one of them representing Cuban socialism, the other, a Cuban born photographer who lives in Venezuela, symbolizing bourgeois values. Eva’s amusing choice is a prophecy of Cuba’s current move away from socialist economic orthodoxy and a far cry from the revolutionary zeal of Humberto Solas’ famed 1968 Cuban feminist film, Lucia.

Like Polynesian vahines (women), Cuban muchachas were famed for their beauty and sensuality, and Cuban women epitomized the silver screen stereotypes of those “hot Latin lovers.” In Habana Eva Torres seems to be toying with these torrid tropical tropes. But, ideology aside, the problem with this movie is that Eva’s friend, Teresa (Yuliet Cruz), outshines her in all of the scenes they appear in together. Teresa is simply sexier, prettier, funnier and more likable and vivacious than Eva (even when she’s dead and becomes a Fellini-esque Yuliet of the spirits!). Cruz simply steals every scene she graces. When she’s offscreen viewers may make that Shakespearian pleading: “Wherefore art thou Yuliet?” To top matters off, Yuliet is actually Cuban, while Prakriti Maduro is Venezuelan. The comparison between the two is similar to comparing Natalie Wood as Maria and Rita Moreno as Anita in West Side Story. But this is a quibble; Habana Eva is a rollicking sex farce with great location shooting in Cuba, charmingly sprinkled with magical realist (not socialist realist!) motion picture pixie dust.

The other films in the series spotlighting Cuba are the documentary Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back To Cuba; the 2003 film, Suite Habana, and the feature, Ticket To Paradise, set during Cuba’s “special period” following the collapse the Soviet Union.

For more information on LAFF 2011's International Spotlight on Cuba: Cuba Spotlight.