Lucia (Solas, 1968): ICA Cinema, 2pm
This film is part of a min-season of Cuban cinema at the ICA. Details here.
New York Times review:
An
openly tendentious tour de force considered by many as Cuban cinema’s
peak accomplishment, Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968) is a
landmark film. Solás, who
died 10 years ago,
was in his mid-20s when he made Cuba’s most elaborate and expensive
movie yet — and perhaps ever. A 2-hour-40-minute black-and-white
pageant, Lucía dramatizes the situation of three oppressed
women, all named Lucía, at cusp moments of Cuban history — the
1890s war of independence, the early 1930s uprising against the
dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and the post-revolutionary ’60s. Each
story has its own style, and each Lucía represents a different
social class. The Lucía of 1895 (played by the stage diva Raquel
Revuelta) is a woman from an aristocratic Havana family who, losing
her youth, embarks on a passionate affair with a handsome Spaniard. A
story of love and betrayal is set against the war between the Spanish
and the Cuban guerrillas known as mambises, many former slaves; the
sequence is reminiscent of but even wilder in its orchestrated tumult
than Luchino Visconti’s operatic costume dramas. Like the lovers in
Visconti’s Senso, the protagonist cannot will herself outside
of history. The
second Lucía (Eslinda Nuñez, who played the object of the
antihero’s fantasies in “Memories
of Underdevelopment”)
is the daughter of a bourgeois family. Unlike the first Lucía, she
tries to engage rather than escape, giving herself to an idealistic
young opponent of the Machado regime. Although not without violence,
this section is tender and even dreamy — episodes of street
fighting punctuate a “new wave” love story. Hauntingly beautiful,
Ms. Nuñez could double for Delphine Seyrig in “Last Year at
Marienbad.” But despite her character’s political commitment, she
is marginalized as a woman even as her intellectual lover is
betrayed. The 1930s revolution is incomplete. The
third Lucía is the Castro equivalent of a Soviet positive heroine —
not unlike Adela Legrá, the captivating untrained actress who plays
her. An illiterate peasant, this Lucía leaves a female work brigade
for love of a self-regarding, insanely proprietary truck driver.
Having traded labor for servitude, she must learn to assert herself
against the traditional macho husband who tells her, “I am the
Revolution.” Reminiscent of the Italian film farces of the ’60s,
the episode employs a rollicking version of the ballad “Guantanamera”
to comment on their conjugal struggle and end the movie on a note of
triumphant ambiguity.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
