developing underdeveloment.

It would be an understatement to call Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s movie Memories of Underdevelopment complicated—there is so much at play in the film. It makes an issue of intelligence, class, revolution, internal struggles, age, gender, etc. In addition, Alea stretches the boundaries of filmmaking itself through the movie. By this, I am referring to the addition of documentary film footage, which is narrated by the protagonist, Sergio. While Desnoes’s story (on which the film is based) is fiction, the Cuban Revolution is obviously a very real part of history. By using documentary footage, Alea is bringing his viewers’ attention to that fact. The film at hand is not simply one about a man’s midlife crisis; it is the crisis of a culture in turmoil. That being said, Sergio’s narrations of both the fictional and nonfiction portions of the movie serve to blur the lines between fact and fiction in terms of the movie in its entirety. While I never actually questioned what was real and what was not, I was engaged with the movie in a different way than if it had been done entirely in one form or the other.

While Alea used the documentary footage to accentuate the meaning of the movie, he manipulated the film to reinforce smaller details as well. In the Elena section of the movie, there is a few scenes or actions that get repeated several times, one after another. For example, there is a man thrusting himself onto a woman at the beach and a backview of Sergio’s wife stepping into the shower. What is Alea getting at with these? I believe he is stating that the sexual charge of this story is not to be ignored, despite the heavier topics at hand.