Lucía (1968)
(Lucia)
Country: Cuba
Technical: bw/1.78:1 160m
Director: Humberto Solás
Cast: Raquel Revuelta, Eslinda Núñez, Adela Legrá
Synopsis:
Three stories of Cuban womanhood: in the 1890s a respectable spinster loses her sanity and status over a handsome Spanish bigamist; in 1932 another girl of landowning class gives up her comfortable life to work in a tobacco factory and live with her political revolutionary lover; in the 1960s, when it is strict revolutionary policy that women work alongside men, a jealous husband keeps his new wife locked up in the house.
Review:
This extremely rough-hewn and overlong work has some fine acting from its first Lucía (Revuelta) but is poorly structured and suffers from lacunae in its story development. The camera aesthetic throughout is a mixture of distant, static shots, chaotic handheld sequence shots and delirious editing (the rape of the nuns, the cavalry battle, the shootout in the theatre), smoothing over any distinction between eras, and image quality is unattractively grainy. Interestingly, the universally paint-peeling walls betray a similarly blanket manifestation of post-revolutionary Cuba! It is nonetheless a key Cuban film in the same way that Marketa Lazarová was a key Czech one.
(Lucia)
Country: Cuba
Technical: bw/1.78:1 160m
Director: Humberto Solás
Cast: Raquel Revuelta, Eslinda Núñez, Adela Legrá
Synopsis:
Three stories of Cuban womanhood: in the 1890s a respectable spinster loses her sanity and status over a handsome Spanish bigamist; in 1932 another girl of landowning class gives up her comfortable life to work in a tobacco factory and live with her political revolutionary lover; in the 1960s, when it is strict revolutionary policy that women work alongside men, a jealous husband keeps his new wife locked up in the house.
Review:
This extremely rough-hewn and overlong work has some fine acting from its first Lucía (Revuelta) but is poorly structured and suffers from lacunae in its story development. The camera aesthetic throughout is a mixture of distant, static shots, chaotic handheld sequence shots and delirious editing (the rape of the nuns, the cavalry battle, the shootout in the theatre), smoothing over any distinction between eras, and image quality is unattractively grainy. Interestingly, the universally paint-peeling walls betray a similarly blanket manifestation of post-revolutionary Cuba! It is nonetheless a key Cuban film in the same way that Marketa Lazarová was a key Czech one.
(Lucia)
Country: Cuba
Technical: bw/1.78:1 160m
Director: Humberto Solás
Cast: Raquel Revuelta, Eslinda Núñez, Adela Legrá
Synopsis:
Three stories of Cuban womanhood: in the 1890s a respectable spinster loses her sanity and status over a handsome Spanish bigamist; in 1932 another girl of landowning class gives up her comfortable life to work in a tobacco factory and live with her political revolutionary lover; in the 1960s, when it is strict revolutionary policy that women work alongside men, a jealous husband keeps his new wife locked up in the house.
Review:
This extremely rough-hewn and overlong work has some fine acting from its first Lucía (Revuelta) but is poorly structured and suffers from lacunae in its story development. The camera aesthetic throughout is a mixture of distant, static shots, chaotic handheld sequence shots and delirious editing (the rape of the nuns, the cavalry battle, the shootout in the theatre), smoothing over any distinction between eras, and image quality is unattractively grainy. Interestingly, the universally paint-peeling walls betray a similarly blanket manifestation of post-revolutionary Cuba! It is nonetheless a key Cuban film in the same way that Marketa Lazarová was a key Czech one.