Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was the both the most internationally celebrated Cuban director, and the most popular domestically (he was affectionally known on the island as Titon). This is down partly to the complexity with which he explored Cuban society, but also, I suspect, due to the fact that he made the flat out funniest films ever made in Cuba. Having proven his revolutionary commitment with his paean to the struggle, Stories of a Revolution (1961), he was able to enjoy much creative freedom, and make films which are the antithesis of propaganda, such as Los Sobrevientes –known in English as The Survivors – in 1979.
Indeed, Alea was engaged in an extended creative dialogue with Luis Bunuel, to whom he dedicated this film. If Alea’s previous film, The Last Supper, had been an elegant riff on the climax of Bunuel’s Viridiana, transposed to Cuba’s colonial past, one can certainly see resonances here with Exterminating Angel. Although, whereas in Bunuel’s film, the bourgeois guests are trapped at a dinner party from which they cannot leave by quasi metaphysical forces, the haute bourgeois family of Alea’s family sequester themselves on their plantation, alongside their servants, to escape the effects of the Cuban Revolution. If the forces of progress are without, the patriarch attempts to impose old school order within. And, like Bunuel, Alea can’t resist some anticlerical satire.
At first, all goes well. Preppers avant la lettre, they’ve stockpiled up on food and the good things in life. Finding his daughter in a dalliance with a young man is an excuse for our patriarch ‘hero’ to call a wedding, and eventually produce a grandchild. However, as the years pass, and they’re isolated from their milieu, their social fabric frays. A baptism for a child is upstaged by the news that the currency has changed, the old Colonial heroes on the banknotes have gone, replaced by heroes of the Revolution, and their money is now worthless.
Flash forward a few years, to – presumably – the swinging sixties, and their attempts at keeping up appearances appear doomed. An incestuous society wedding is facilitated – as always – by the labour of the servants, now demoted to slaves, as capitalism has crumbled, and our aristos have degenerated to feudalism.
Worse is still to come.
Indeed, as the attempts to maintain patriarchal order and bourgeois propriety become increasingly deranged, we may be reminded of another classic of Latin American cinema, made by Bunuel’s Mexican protégé, Arturo Ripstein’s Castle of Purity, where Claudio Brook (hero of Bunuel’s Simon of the Desert) attempts to keep his family safe from the temptations of modern life and permissiveness by creating an oppressive artificial environment for them– yes, that is the plot of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth.
Certainly, this film is a welcome restoration, and an intriguing addition to Alea’s diverse oeuvre. It’s also fun, with lashings of satire at the silly bourgeoisie’s expense. I’m sure that some of the jokes are quite local, and may have gone above my head. However, as the forces of regression try and drag us all back to some hallucinated ancient regime which never existed, globally, it’s ultimately a film that has relevance for all of us, outside the strict context of the Cuban Revolution.
