MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT (Gutierrez Alea, 1968)
Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, Release Date 8/28/2018
Review by Christopher S. Long
In a silent exchange, Sergio (Sergio
Corrieri) bids farewell to his wife at the Havana airport, a scene
the handheld camera almost seems to pick up by accident. Though his
wife is heading off to Miami for good, Sergio doesn't seem
particularly perturbed to stay behind alone.
Then again, nothing much seems to truly
touch the suave playboy. It's 1961 and revolution has just swept his
island home, but he whiles his days away either knocking about
aimlessly in his swanky apartment, trying on his wife's stockings out
of sheer boredom, or cruising the streets looking for young women to
charm. Pity poor Elena (Daisy Granados) for being one of the first to
catch Sergio's eye; he'll soon grow as bored with the teenage naif as
he does with everything else in life. His crass treatment of the
young girl (seduced and abandoned!) will eventually lead to a
courtroom case where his lofty status in the former social hierarchy
may or may not save him in the revolutionary order.
But that capsule summary misrepresents
writer/director Tomás
Gutiérrez Alea's
“Memories of Underdevelopment” (1968), widely hailed as one of
the great masterpieces of Cuban cinema. Gutiérrez
Alea's film only nominally follows the barest sketch of a plot.
Instead, the film employs a dizzying array of audiovisual strategies
to contrast the personal with the historical, a history playing out
with equal force in both the past and the present.
Set in 1961 and 1962, essentially
between the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the
film mixes in ample doses of actuality footage from newsreels to
still photographs. Sergio paces around his apartment while tanks
rumble through the streets of Havana. Sergio expresses his idle
thoughts in voiceover (“This island is a trap”) to nobody but
himself; Fidel Castro spits fire to an entire nation at a
fist-pounding press conference. Editor Nelson Rodríguez
performs a minor miracle in deftly stitching all the disparate
sources together in startling and provocative ways.
Sergio does everything he can to
insulate himself from both his own past and his country's present. He
laughs while listening to an audio recording of an argument he had
with his wife, but when the film flashes back to depict the actual
moment, even the faintest illusion of Sergio's cultivated aloofness
is demolished; he is a coward and a bully. He can ignore those tanks
rolling through the streets as long as he wants to, but they'll still
be knocking down the walls of his apartment building any day now.
Gutiérrez
Alea adapted a short novel by the Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes, who
also co-wrote the script along with the director. While the film
savagely critiques the detached privilege and willful blindness of
its wealthy protagonist, its attitude towards the Cuban Revolution is
more ambiguous. Sergio has good reason to hide away in his fortress
of privilege, and perhaps his wife was the smart one in showing the
initiative and foresight to flee rather than staying behind because
it was easier and more comfortable.
Video:
The film is presented in its original
1.66:1 aspect ratio. The camera negative suffered from “advanced
vinegar syndrome” which required the use of an interpositive print
to replace multiple reels. The extensive restoration involved a host
of entities including Cineteca di Bologna, L'Immagine Ritrovata, the
George Lucas Family Foundation, and The Film Foundation's World
Cinema Project.
The massive restoration project has
certainly paid off. Though the occasional scene shows some signs of
damage (mostly a few shots just looking a bit softer than the rest),
the image quality is generally quite sharp. The black-and-white
contrast isn't quite as sharp, but still strong. Few viewers have
ever seen the film looking this good.
Audio:
The linear PCM mono track is adequate
if not particularly robust. A few pops and hisses, the occasional
modest dropoff, but all due to damage to the sound negative. Optional
English subtitles support the Spanish audio.
Extras:
Criterion has stacked this new Blu-ray
release with a diverse array of supplementary features, some made
just for the Criterion release, others culled from archival sources.
The collection begins with two new
interviews recorded by Criterion. In the first (2018, 19 min.),
critics B. Ruby Rich and José
Antonio Évora discuss
Gutiérrez Alea's career,
noting the esteemed status he held in Cuba's film community when he
released “Memories of Underdevelopment” in 1968. This piece also
emphasizes the director's focus on filmmaking as a communal effort.
In another new interview (2018, 16 min.) novelist/screenwriter
Edmundo Desnoes shares his ideological perspective when writing
“Memories,” both the book and then the screenplay.
The disc also includes two recent
interviews from 2017. Actress Daisy Granados (9 min.) talks about
working with Gutiérrez
Alea; Elena wasn't her first prominent role, but it was a major
breakthrough for her. Editor Nelson Rodríguez
(16 min.) discusses the rewards and challenges of working on a film
project that didn't rely on a fully-fixed script. Gutiérrez
Alea gave him a lot of latitude in the editing room, forcing
Rodríguez to really push
himself. He notes that edited archival footage (which, itself, was
already edited) was the most difficult part. This is my favorite
feature on the disc.
We also get an audio-only interview
with Gutiérrez Alea,
conducted in 1989. It runs 11 minutes and I wouldn't call it
revelatory, but it's of interest.
The lengthiest supplemental feature on
the disc is “Titón:
From Havana to 'Guantanamera'” (2008, 96 min.), a documentary by
Mirtha Ibarra, the director's widow. Ibarra notes that this
documentary is her remembrance, but that “I want other to tell me
about him.” She begins by talking to the director's sister about
his childhood, then to numerous friends, co-workers and admirers.
The collection wraps up with a
Theatrical Trailer (3 min.)
The slim fold-out insert booklet
features an essay by author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.
Final Thoughts:
I don't possess the requisite knowledge
to assess what Gutiérrez
Alea's is saying about post-revolutionary Cuba. I can understand,
however, why “Memories of Underdevelopment” is widely heralded as
on the greatest Cuban films ever made. Criterion has provided an
excellent Blu-ray release, featuring a high-def transfer of an
extensively restored print and an array of insightful supplements.
This will no doubt feature prominently on many year-end lists of the
best Blu-ray releases of 2018.
