Ku.Ba about Cuba

The time has come to pay my respects to the piece of art which constituted the inspiration for the tagline of this blog: Soy Ku.Ba meets Soy Cuba.

First some general information to start with (lazily copy-pasted from Wikipedia):

Soy Cuba (meaning I am Cuba) is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm. The movie was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States 30 years later. The movie's acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise en scene prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s.

Well, thank you very much Mister Scorsese.

I won’t beat about the bush: Soy Cuba had a very unpromising beginning for me. Of course, I knew in advance that I could look forward to a piece of communist propaganda, but the immediate usage of extremely simplistic caricatures really put a damper on my other, high expectations of the film.

The American tourists in the hotel lounge for instance, are portrayed very weakly: the acting as well as the dubbing are awfully poor, deepening the impression that you’re watching a bunch of fake characters. In addition, during these scenes the music is disturbingly noisy (the bells and whistles on the terrace) and tedious ( " amor loco, loco loco ∞ " ). On the other hand though, the highly praised camera shots really meet the expectations during the intro and the terrace scene (especially when the camera dives into the swimming pool without any interruption) but unfortunately fail to do so in the bar where the camera tries to pass through bamboo sticks which causes a rather messy appearance.

But thankfully, the far-from-exciting segment with the prostitute ends quickly to make way for the story of the sugarcane farmer with which the movie starts to get a lot more interesting. This second segment is a short but powerful account of the suffering of dispossessed farmers, accompanied by charmingly sultry shots of the cane field and the hard blue (!) sky above (yes, I'm aware I was watching a black-and-white movie; you figure). And, it has to be said: what an impressively muscled pair of arms the old man had! (see image)

This is also the moment where the acting gets better and the music more pleasant. But of course it’s still the cinematography stealing the show with its beautiful panoramas and extremely distinct camera takes. It obviously reaches its peak during the mass funeral scene. For me personally, the scene where the cigar workers hang out the flag, after which the camera flies across it to reveal an exceptionally wonderful Havanese street view, was a true moment of goose bumps. (see image: if you look closely, you can notice the robe to which the camera seems to be attached)

The voice-over also deserves a small mention: on the whole, it is a welcome accompaniment - serene and sufficiently poetic.

But in the end, Soy Cuba still remains propaganda of course and for a piece of art that will always be a burden because of the forced symbolism indissolubly attached to it. Worth to mention in this case is for example the scene with the shot pigeon and, again, the ones with the snobby Americans (including the marines). Nevertheless, all the weak points of the movie are more than sufficiently compensated by the impressive cinematography, the, generally speaking, very interesting story and the beauty which is already inherent in Cuban nature and population. Great title, great movie.

My rating:

4/5