This Sixties classic of the Cuban cinema, made by Tomas Gutierrez Alea and revived as part of an excellent Cuban season at the Barbican, is one of the most audacious and sophisticated of its time.
It stars Sergio Corrieri as a bourgeois property-owning writer struggling to adapt to the realities of Castro's revolution. He has chosen to stay in Havana while his family decamps to America because he believes society has to change. But his doubting mind and heart get him into serious trouble. Alea paints him as an introspective, almost Europeanised intellectual but by no means as decadent as other Marxist film-makers might have made him. It's an extraordinary film to be financed by a government-controlled body - but then Alea was secretly rather like the writer himself.
He never made a finer, more nuanced film. Nor did anyone else among the bunch of directors who gave Cuba such prominence in the festivals and cinemas of the West at the time.
Memories Of Underdevelopment
