A few minutes before the first fireworks announced 2024, my year ended with the viewing of Alán González's debut feature, a special occasion because it is the work of one of my best friends during the years I lived in Cuba. The film closes this year of cultural and artistic ups and downs with a final flourish, a beautiful, explosive, intense and tenacious film.
In «The Wild Woman» Alán returns to the inner city that surrounds La Habana and he once again gives us a sample of the misery and contrasts of that sector, that face of the city that the cinema of socialist realism made up, disguised, or hid, even in the most daring films of the 1960s and 70s, such as «Memories of Underdevelopment» and «One Way or Another.» The first two scenes establish the tone in which much of the plot will take place: first, Yolanda dances to the rhythm of a conga, at a house party of liquor, sweat and excess, and then she has a brutal and fleeting sexual encounter with her fugitive man, who only seeks his own pleasure. A few years ago, I wrote: "in Alán's imagination (...) there are no limits: he writes scenes that leave me speechless (...), he contrives dialogues of a biting nature that surprise me even more for their simplicity, and he creates plots with a cerebral sense of humor, without detaching himself from the dramatic reality of his native Cuba." All of this is present in «The Wild Woman.»
And in this film, which is part of what I call "the Cuban cinema of rubble", Alán tells us that in Cuba emotion and passion survive as two expressions that reaffirm the desire to live amid lack. That emotional side that economic, social, or political systems do not bend, is here manifested through the character of Yolanda, a classic representative of the lumpen scum who puts prejudices in check with her indomitable motherly love. The doors are closed to Yolanda, a video is circulating where her man attacks her black lover (who has been hospitalized), apparently before the eyes of her son, with tragic consequences: little Yónatan is kidnapped by her grandmother. That search, that pilgrimage through the city in search of her child, in which Yolanda faces police, religion and family that block her pursuit, occupies half of the script by Alán and Nuri Duarte. In the second part of the film, there is no limit to the emotional flow, a beautiful emotion between mother and son in a courtship through the city.
In addition to the outstanding tasks of direction, script, Lorenzo Casadio's cinematography and an extraordinary soundtrack of off-screen dialogues, screams and laughter that complement and enhance the action within the image, Lola Amores shines for her wonderful and moving composition of the difficult character of Yolanda, as well as the boy Jean Marcos Fraga Piedra as Yónatan, who lights up the frame with his smile, as he begins to give in to his mother's loving demonstrations. A film that is appreciated and that sets the record straight about Cuba, in a wise way that reaches the heart and reason.
In «The Wild Woman» Alán returns to the inner city that surrounds La Habana and he once again gives us a sample of the misery and contrasts of that sector, that face of the city that the cinema of socialist realism made up, disguised, or hid, even in the most daring films of the 1960s and 70s, such as «Memories of Underdevelopment» and «One Way or Another.» The first two scenes establish the tone in which much of the plot will take place: first, Yolanda dances to the rhythm of a conga, at a house party of liquor, sweat and excess, and then she has a brutal and fleeting sexual encounter with her fugitive man, who only seeks his own pleasure. A few years ago, I wrote: "in Alán's imagination (...) there are no limits: he writes scenes that leave me speechless (...), he contrives dialogues of a biting nature that surprise me even more for their simplicity, and he creates plots with a cerebral sense of humor, without detaching himself from the dramatic reality of his native Cuba." All of this is present in «The Wild Woman.»
And in this film, which is part of what I call "the Cuban cinema of rubble", Alán tells us that in Cuba emotion and passion survive as two expressions that reaffirm the desire to live amid lack. That emotional side that economic, social, or political systems do not bend, is here manifested through the character of Yolanda, a classic representative of the lumpen scum who puts prejudices in check with her indomitable motherly love. The doors are closed to Yolanda, a video is circulating where her man attacks her black lover (who has been hospitalized), apparently before the eyes of her son, with tragic consequences: little Yónatan is kidnapped by her grandmother. That search, that pilgrimage through the city in search of her child, in which Yolanda faces police, religion and family that block her pursuit, occupies half of the script by Alán and Nuri Duarte. In the second part of the film, there is no limit to the emotional flow, a beautiful emotion between mother and son in a courtship through the city.
In addition to the outstanding tasks of direction, script, Lorenzo Casadio's cinematography and an extraordinary soundtrack of off-screen dialogues, screams and laughter that complement and enhance the action within the image, Lola Amores shines for her wonderful and moving composition of the difficult character of Yolanda, as well as the boy Jean Marcos Fraga Piedra as Yónatan, who lights up the frame with his smile, as he begins to give in to his mother's loving demonstrations. A film that is appreciated and that sets the record straight about Cuba, in a wise way that reaches the heart and reason.
