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Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

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From Time Out Film Guide

Director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is more famous for making Cuba’s first gay-themed movie, 1993’s ‘Strawberry and Chocolate’. But in 1968, for his fifth feature he adapted Edmundo Desnoes’s novel and made a disconsolate meditation which shocked his Marxist masters and now occupies a defining place in Latin American cinema.

Historically, it’s very specific – it reflects the hiatus between the US-led Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and John F Kennedy’s announcement of Cuban missile manufacture the next year. But the film stimulates with its stylistic eclecticism, formal experimentalism and intellectual curiosity. ‘You’re nothing,’ says 17-year-old Elena to her lover, Sergio, a 38-year-old intellectual who feels redundant after the revolution. As Alea’s camera roams Sergio’s empty flat (his wife and child have fled), we watch him spying on sunbathers or reminiscing about visits to brothels.

This putative essay in self-criticism mutates into something more melancholy, lyrical and universal. As a film about change, outsiderdom and the gaze, it holds a rich fascination. And, despite the film’s flow being interrupted – by Godardian caprice, documentary realism or Russian constructivist-style inserts – it achieves a satisfying integrity.

Author: Wally Hammond

Time Out Film Guide

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