Amazon.com video review:
While his family fled to America in the wake of the revolution, Cuban
intellectual Sergio has stayed behind--more due to passivity than political
commitment. Unable to imagine himself a part of the new landscape, his
days are spent killing time: gazing out his balcony telescope; taking lazy,
aimless walks down neighborhood streets lined with both shady trees and his
own clamorous memories; smoking in bed. All the while his head teems with
thoughts of Cuba's cultural inferiority to Europe, self-pitying diatribes,
and erotic reveries. Disgusted by his own diffidence, Sergio can't even
see the irony when his scathing assessment of the teenage actress manqué
he picks up on the street works equally well to describe himself. No less
than the "underdeveloped" Erica, he has become alienated, filled with "the
inability to relate to things, to accumulate experience, to develop."
Probably because his film's central figure is so inactive, director Tomás
Gutiérrez Alea constructed his 1968 masterpiece out of a riot of
influences and styles, throwing seemingly everything he could think of into the
pot. There are minidocumentaries on the cruelties of Batista forces,
stream-of-consciousness flashbacks and flash-forwards, delicate little
photomontages, newspaper headlines, visits to Hemingway's home, even a
philological debate attended by Sergio. The last does get a little
tiresome; but other than the one misstep, Memories of
Underdevelopment is such a vivid, consistently fresh and surprising
film--intellectually and sensually vibrant from start to finish--that it's
little wonder its belated foreign release single-handedly put Cuban cinema
on the map. --Bruce Reid
