Lucia

Humberto Solás' point of departure is Woof's feminine Anonymous throughout history, unto her a name plus three epochs. "Despierten, Cubanos!" The colonial aristocracy of 1895 is an imitation of European order, thus a lampoon of Visconti for the affair of the society lady (Raquel Revuelta). Forbidden romance during the War of Independence, the suitor who turns out to be a Spanish agent (Eduardo Moure), a blanched screen streaked with deranged swirls. Parallel to the gentility is the nun driven mad and scraggly by rape, just a little tale to shake up a sewing circle one boring afternoon. L'amour et la mort, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Chimes at Midnight in the muddy battlefield, political awareness is made up of such shocks. The bourgeois gazelle in 1932 (Eslinda Núñez) experiences an awakening of her own, scribbling "Down with Machado" on lavatory mirrors, stepping out with protest crowds, and ditching the Charleston for a tango. The idealistic rebel she marries (Ramón Brito) takes action with machine-gun in hand, but the dictator's fall is little more than a change in management. (New Havana is still the old Babylon squeezed through a wide-angle lens.) "I didn't rise up so others could fight like piranhas over positions," cf. Huston's We Were Strangers. Operatic tragedy, existential reverie, finally bumptious farce. The happy prole in the sugarcane fields (Adela Legrá), high on a sexual holiday with her new husband (Adolfo Llauradó). Batista is out, the Revolution is in full swing, the honeymoon comes to an end. Progress means work and education, the obstacle is the macho lunkhead literally boarding up his wife at home. "He says he's the Revolution!" Consciousness is a work in progress, the guffawing view of its push-pull at the close zigzags toward Bertolucci's 1900. With Idalia Anreus, Silvia Planas, Flora Lauten, Rogelio Blain, Maria Elena Molinet, and Aramís Delgado. In black and white.