Memories of Underdevelopment

Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual living off of (seemingly tenuous) rental income as a property holder, decides to stay in Cuba. The conflict set up between his intellectual convictions and the reality of Cuban life in the wake of the revolution makes up the central problem of the film. The film presents a year in the life of the protagonist, a year culminating in the missile crises of 1962. What makes the film is the candid nature of it's reflections on the role of the intellectual in political life - certainly THE hot topic during the summer of 1968. The film is also a stylistic tour de force, welding together neorealistic drama, newsreel footage, montages of life in contemporary Havana as seen from Sergio's flat (through a telescope), and some filmed Shavian-styled debates amid the action. Far from being a typical propaganda piece, the films treatment of the future of the revolution was very open ended, candid, and thoughtful. It's a film that emerges from the debates about the future and which stages it's own participation in that debate. The film features two significant cameos: Edmundo Desnoes - the author of the novel on which the film is based, and Gutierez Alea himself. Both cameos occur in diegetic reflections about art: a debate about literature in the case of Desnoes, and a talk with a young director in the case of Alea. This film is almost impossible to find in the US thanks to the Cuban expatriate zealot nonsense. It's available in Mexico though - on a fairly well mastered DVD. It's worth seeking out. It's one of the best Cuban films ever and one of the greatest films of the new wave era.

If you are inclined to think that Third World Cinema is simplistic and one-dimensional, I invite you see Tomas Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, selected by the New York Times in 1974 as one of the year's ten best movies. Based on the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoës, a Cuban writer who lived in the United States, Memories is a complex and probing film about the dilemma faced by intellectuals in Cuba following the revolution. Although directed by a Cuban who supported the revolution and remained in Cuba until his death, the film has a European sensibility, interlacing fiction and documentary footage and using poetic images, literary narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage reminiscent of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) is a frustrated writer who chooses to remain in Cuba rather than follow his family to Miami just "to see how it all turns out". Though he has strong feelings for his people, he is indifferent towards politics an observer rather than a participant. Alea shows the artist as anti-hero, a man who undergoes an identity crisis, is sapped of all his vitality, feels old in his thirties, and drifts along without meaning and purpose. Unable to write the novel he wants, Sergio survives on rental income from apartments and lives in middle class luxury while around him housing is deteriorating and there are serious gas and oil shortages. He spends his days smoking in bed, looking out of a telescope through his bedroom window, taking walks, watching television, and meeting young women. He makes no pretense of his being an outsider but complains that "everything happens to me too early or too late". Hanna, the woman he says he truly loved urged him to move to New York with her and become a writer but he chose to remain in Cuba to go into the furniture business.

When Sergio makes the acquaintance of Elena (Daisy Granados), a sixteen- year-old girl who wants to be an actress, his life takes on new meaning but it is temporary and the affair ends badly. Persuading her that he knows important people in the theatrical world, he brings her to his apartment and they begin a relationship in which he tries to model her to fit his ideal of the bourgeois Cuban woman. He takes her to modern art galleries and the home of writer Ernest Hemingway to expose her to culture but it doesn't work and he complains when she doesn't fit into his mold. "She doesn't relate to things," he tells himself. "It's one of the signs of underdevelopment." Elena, like other Cuban women", he says, has an "inability to relate to things, to accumulate experience, to develop", but the stricture can just as easily refer to himself and he pays the price of this experience when the girl's parents bring a lawsuit against him for rape. Although he escapes the fate of a criminal, little by little the outside world, the world of guns, slogans, and rallies closes in on him and he feels trapped.

There are several documentary sequences interspersed throughout the film that have no apparent connection to the narrative but convey the sense that no one living in revolutionary Cuba is able to escape the presence of history. The opening sequence shows a public dance in which all the participants are black with the exception of Sergio who is white. In this sequence continued later in the film, an unnamed political leader is assassinated. In other footage, we see excerpts from the trial of counterrevolutionaries captured at Playa Giron, the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and a third in which we hear the voices of Castro and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis.

Though Alea apparently wants us to see the fate that befalls someone who does not directly endorse revolutionary activities, he makes his character so appealing and sympathetic that, to me, the film had mixed messages. I was torn between my support of the aims of the revolution and empathizing with Sergio's disdain for the emptiness of both the Cuban bourgeois and the revolutionary leadership. An event that took place only three years after Memories of Underdevlopment was released, however, underscored the point that Sergio was making. At that time, Castro, at the First National Congress on Education and Culture, said that artists and writers must reject "all manifestations of a decadent culture, the fruit of societies that are rent by contradictions". Not surprisingly, although due to receive a special prize for the film from the U.S. National Society of Film Critics in 1973, Gutiérrez Alea was denied a visa to attend the ceremony.

There are some great comments and facts here about this gem and I'll try not to repeat them. Alea presents a realistic, fascinating, and believable dramatization of the moral and political quagmire set in the early-Castro era through the POV of an apathetic bourgeois. The story delves into the inner psyche of Sergio, a lonely eccentric and sets out to illustrate its impact during the alienation on every level intertwined by transitioning culture at that time. He gets caught up in a relationship with Elena, their happiness seems perfect.

Alea elaborates this predictable story in which, from the beginning, the idea is built that something does not fully agree with what Sergio think will happen. The narration submerges you in the timeline and slowly seams things together in a brilliant and subtle way. I have always enjoyed this film minute by minute, the upheavals and the disappoints that happens to break the character mentally. The film is shot in semi-documentary style which is one of the highlights as it pushes the narrative with no room for spoon-fed character development. Even with limited emphasis on traditional storytelling the film carries emotional impact with solid acting effort throughout the runtime. Some may look at it from the view of art-house documentary with newsreel footage of the Cuban Revolution dressed up as a political drama, but it is more than that. Also, I will recommend Stefan Uher's The Sun in a Net (1963), Halina Bielinska's Sam posród miasta (1965), Paulo César Saraceni The Dare (1966), The Vampires of Poverty (1977), The Man Who Sleeps (1974) and Ice (1970). If you haven't seen it, I would suggest you do add it in your watch list.

To conclude Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) is simply a brilliant character analysis, also a cleverly constructed political drama realised in a time where the facts truly are in your face.

The fact that I enjoyed this a lot whilst disliking much within the film is odd. It is a compelling tale set at the beginning of the 60s as tensions between the US and Cuba increase and are complicated by an opportunist USSR and the cinematography is daringly wondrous making even the seeming mundane something of beauty. On the other hand our narrator and main guy played by Sergio Corrieri is hard to feel much empathy for as he spurns the US and the chance to flee there with his wife and friends but also the Cubans he is left behind with. The dialogue seems clumsy and this could well be the translation but inevitably much is made of the issue of 'underdevelopment' which our hero uses to explain why he cannot relate to the Cuban population. His elitist stand seems to be that because they are so 'underdeveloped' he cannot really relate to them. Nevertheless the film bulges with historic detail and local colour and significance so that even the film's seeming main thrust cannot spoil our pleasure.

I saw this film in a film class, where we were looking at the mix of elements of documentary footage as well as fictional footage (including the use of archives, stills, voice-over), in relation to Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. All I can say is that I was interested in the film, and at times my interest really peaked up with the style, but it's not for everyone, that's for sure. The director is very talented with mixing the elements of making narrative out of seemingly non-narrative. Here and there I was even reminded of Bertolucci's Before the Revolution. But here and there I wondered 'would this be just better as a straight documentary on the post Cuban revolutionary world?' The questions raised by its main character Sergio are intelligent, but there are so many of them thrown at a viewer, or just in observations. And you may need to be completely up on your Cuban history circa late 50's-early 60's to catch some of the stuff inside.

The storyline itself is actually just as involving, if not more so, than the documentary side to the film, as Sergio's viewpoint of the Cuban's (misguided) revolutionary stances and problems with the bourgeoisie is a parallel to his relationships with women. The story with the young girl he seduces, and gets in trouble with, are some of my favorite scenes from the lot (and when I most woke up to watch). It's a little more tedious at times than 'Hiroshima' was as a hybrid-style film, and even with its gritty style that even in fictional form is very documentary-like, it didn't blow me away as much as it has for others who have commented here. However, I would say if you're into the history and hows and whys of the Cuban revolution and Castro and the Bay of Pigs, AND want a character to guide you through it all, this is quite the view.