GUANTANAMERA (52)

Directed by: Tomas Gutierrez Alea (with Juan Carlos Tabio)

Starring: Mirta Ibarra, Jorge Perugorria, Carlos Cruz

The Pitch: Complications along a journey from one end of Cuba to the other, transporting an old woman's body for burial.

Theo Sez: Alea's last film is as ambivalent about Fidel's revolution as his most famous one - MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT - was 30 years ago ; and, as in that film, he seems torn between an intellectual's patrician disdain for its messy inefficiency and a populist's love for the unpredictable life in its fallacies and contradictions. The peeks into contemporary Cuba are the most interesting aspect of this fairly mild movie - a country where "Socialismo" is graffitied on the walls and an appeal to "patriotism" can clinch any argument, even as people have to take menial jobs or engage in "illegal" entrepreneurism in order to survive. They remain nonetheless proud, fiery and emotionally confused - real people, in other words - and the film is often graceful as it intertwines their various stories - though often flat when it stays too long on any one of them. Like Alea's penultimate film, STRAWBERRY AND CHOCOLATE, it's charming rather than clever or profound, notable mainly for its glimpses into an often-propagandised (and / or demonised) but rarely-seen national culture - and for intriguing incidentals, like Perugorria's role as a libidinous truck-driver following his effete gay hero in STRAWBERRY. Did he feel, in this macho Latin country, that he somehow had to "prove" his virility?