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Red tape is what gives hell its color, angelic statuary and the flush of a toilet kick off the attack on systematized absurdity. A single word ("proletario") is enough to summarize the deceased, in life he had worked on a dispenser of marble busts of José Martí before being swallowed up by the machine. The man's union card is buried along with him, his widow (Silvia Planas) needs it for pension, his nephew (Salvador Wood) is off to retrieve it. The waiter's fanged smile at the café is the first hint of horror seeping into comedy, soon after the protagonist is pushing the exhumed casket down the street with dogs snapping at his feet. A troublesome corpse, as Hitchcock would say (it's dropped off a cliff in a dream sequence), a second entombment arranged and canceled, the large-scale slapstick violence of hearses and wreaths and pies a year after The Great Race. Orders and applications, complaints and departments, stamps and signatures. "Natural order requires process," cf. Welles' The Trial. The opening credits appear on an administrative memo, on them Tomás Gutiérrez Alea thanks the usual art-house suspects along with Laurel and Hardy and Marilyn Monroe. Lost in the labyrinth, shunted from desk to desk in a vast office, dangling from a ledge à la Harold Lloyd, sanity has its limits. Billy Wilder at the atelier of poster art with an octopus pinned to a canvas ("to symbolize imperialism") and a bikini model wielding the Revolution's hammer, judicious use of animation and undercracking adds to the fierce satirical texture. Cuban ideals and Cuban realities, a well-attended double funeral at the close. "This would have never happened in China!" With Manuel Estanillo, Omar Alfonso, Gaspar De Santelices, Elsa Montero, and Luis Romay. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |