Of the many ways we human beings have to express dissatisfaction with the social, economic or ideological issues that we confront during our lifetime, we have found in art (including auteurist cinema) bright ways to express our discrepancy with established orders: in Cuban audiovisuals, for example, of a few products that I have recently seen, the controversial documentaries by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida approach facts and persons in an affectionate way. His works have the force of the young man who argues, but at the same time he gives space to lyricism, as well as plasticity and intelligence that often compensate for restrictions, even when he films animals, as a rotund mother pig that wanders through a beach along with her piggies in «Verdadero Beach» (2012), making us smile gently.
That critical approach through a gaze that is also affectionate and tolerant, usually leads me to the films of Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel, two filmmakers with different views of the world, who shared a kind treatment of our strengths and weaknesses. This option is also evident in Carlos Lechuga's first film, «Melaza» (2012), which opened during the Havana film festival. Although he prefers to cite the influence of Bruno Dumont, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and other more recent filmmakers, I evoke Renoir's and Buñuel's way of saying hard things without being humiliating or hurting, a method that is quite often more effective than angry diatribes or violent portraits of societies absorbed in blood and other fluids.
Melaza was a sugar-producing settlement, but it is now facing unemployment and poverty (never exposed with laments, mock or misanthropy). In Melaza, people lack so many things that their lives are determined by the options and solutions they have to struggle to find. In this community, the young couple of Monica (Yuliet Cruz) and Aldo (Armando Miguel Gómez), who live with her mother and a little girl from another liaison, finds the less edifying, less clever and less healthy alternatives to make ends meet.
I do not know what the best solutions would be, and I do not want to make suggestions: once Cuban maestro Humberto Solás stopped me dead telling me that only Cubans should solve Cuban problems, and that no Panamanian could do it with his little notes on films. I left him pensive though, when I told him that the Cuban obsession with the consumption of meat (of all kinds) was a cultural obstacle to find better alternatives in daily life That was almost 30 years ago but still today, meat is taken as solution to many problems, as it has been well registered, in a conscious way or not, by the novel «The King of Havana» to «Juan of the Dead» (which, seen from this perspective, is a masterpiece of Cuban obsession for meat), up to «Melaza», in which we see Monica in her work place, planning sex as she methodically and obsessively moves a mattress that, in the end, will become the key to her perdition.
This sort of «blindness» determines the hard outcome, the harsh resolution that, in part due to Lechuga's slow and deliberate rhythm and tone, turns into a painful slap that inflamed several male spectators in the audience. «Melaza» always maintains a much welcome humorous approach (see the children's swimming lessons, the way Mónica behaves in the ghost sugar refinery, the speeches on the radio), but in the final third the script takes a most bizarre turn, from the moment Mónica sets an appointment in the refinery with Márquez (Luis Antonio Gotti), an officer who can employ persons in Melaza, in exchange, in this case, of sexual services.
Lechuga (who also wrote the script) opts for strange ellipsis, for the elusion of conclusive expositions in certain scenes, for images that are close to magic realism, to reach an open, unresolved ending, in need of solution. «Melaza» is not an easy film to watch, but Carlos Lechuga tells his tale in an entertaining way, and as conscious as he is of the sadness that hides beneath the smiles, he wisely let his story end in 80 minutes, that sum up a fine first work and launch the career of a new talent in Cuban cinema.
