Lost movie

Noel Vera

"The Lost City" represents sixteen years of director-producer-
composer-lead actor Andy Garcia's life, devoted to the attempt to
bring the screenplay of film critic and intellectual G. Cabrera
Infante--the "James Joyce of Cuba"--to the big screen. At first it
was to be an adaptation of Infante's novel "Three Trapped Tigers"--a
big, playful, pun-filled look at the Havana nightlife before Castro
took over (and long considered unadaptable), but the project, grand
enough in its original form, grew grander and grander, and in the
end Infante wrote a huge screenplay that bore little resemblance to
the original source novel. Over the years that screenplay was
trimmed down again and again, and the delay was such that Infante
never saw the finished product commercially released (Infante saw it
before he died in 2005, according to Garcia, but didn't say whether
he liked it or not).

It's hard to be hard on what obviously was a labor of love, and for
Garcia, the film seems nothing but. But "The Lost City" is a hundred
and forty-three minute mess, an epic mostly in sweep and length and
the subjects it dares tackle--from Batista, Castro, the Communist
Party, and Cuban music, to the life and loves of an entire family--
without, however, the ruthless discipline required to tell the story
coherently, much less the skill to make it consistently
entertaining. Even with the lengthy running time, you barely get to
know the characters--Garcia as Fico Fellove spends much of that time
mulling his problems over various Cuban drinks, the camera taking
endless close-ups of his intense Spaniel eyes (still the heartthrob
of many a woman, despite his being over fifty); Ines Sastre as
Aurora Fellove (Fico's sister-in-law, and later, great love) is
staggeringly beautiful what with her royal cheekbones and swan neck,
but not exactly brimming over with vitality--the two together make a
glamorous but somehow lifeless couple.

The film itself is an odd mix of various movies and works of
literature, clumsily stirred together. Critics have mentioned
Francis Coppola's "Godfather" films (the scenes of Batista
renouncing power; an old man dropping dead from a heart attack in
his garden; the presence of Garcia himself, who played a crucial
supporting role in Coppola's third Godfather film) and Michael
Curtiz's "Casablanca" (nonpartisan club owner involved with a
mysterious beauty belatedly grows a conscience); I'd throw in Bob
Fosse's "Cabaret" (song-and-dance numbers providing musical
accompaniment to the fading of a decadent era), James Ivory's "The
White Countess" (yet another apolitical club owner involved with a
beauty trying to stay afloat in tumultuous times), and Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (South American
family saga against a background of political unrest). Garcia seems
to want to cram it all into his Cuban epic, but reverently,
reverently, with much of the juice and energy of the aforementioned
films tastefully wrung out.

The result should be dry and inedible but oddly it isn't; at least,
not completely. Garcia also packs the film full of beautiful dancers
and even more beautiful melodies, and if the screen isn't exactly
awash with dramatic fireworks, it is drenched in Cuban music (some
of which Garcia composed), brilliantly cued and lovingly presented,
easily the single most passionate element in this passionless yet
fascinating motion picture. The cast ranges from serviceable
(Garcia), to wooden (Sastre) to two performances that stand out for
their peculiarity. Dustin Hoffman does an interesting cameo turn as
Jewish mob boss Meyer Lansky, sweeping into Cuba to make Fico a
generous offer on his club (which Fico tactfully turns down); Lansky
promptly disappears for the rest of the film (leaving the question
dangling: should Fico have accepted his offer or not? Did Lansky
really blow up Fico's club as a kind of reprimand?), only to
reappear in New York just in time to assure Fico he wasn't
responsible for the bombing (really?) and offer detailed advice on
the making of a perfect egg cream.

Even better than Hoffman as Lanskey is Bill Murray as--though it's
never directly mentioned in the credits or any of the promotional
material--Infante himself, quipping constantly from the sidelines
and making outrageous comments that should have gotten him summarily
executed several times over by Lansky, Batista, even Castro himself
(to the already tottering heap of allusions and influences both
cinematic and literate, add the Fool in Shakespeare's "King Lear").
Murray's is easily the single best performance--hell, the single
best thing, even, setting aside the music--in the entire film. His
lines (which feel like classic Murray improvisations) don't stick
out in this sober historical drama as much as they seem to subvert
it; I think it's possible to argue that Murray's character and his
interpretation more than anything else embodies the playfulness of
Infante's fiction (possibly it helped that Murray used to golf with
Infante). Murray in fact presents such a vividly sketched and
preformed character one wonders why Garcia didn't make him the
protagonist, sweeping Garcia and Sastre's yawn-inducing romance to
the sidelines, where it belonged. Not such an outrageous idea--
Infante's parents were founding members of the Cuban Communist
Party; Infante himself was temporarily jailed by Batista for his
opposition; under the Castro regime he was named director of the
Instituto del Cine and head of the literary supplement to the
Communist newspaper Revolucion; he fell partly out of favor and was
sent to Belgium as cultural attaché; he eventually grew
disillusioned with Castro and lived the rest of his life as an
exile. Reading Infante's life, you can just smell the scent of a
lively, entertaining biopic buried somewhere between the highlights;
it would be the role of a lifetime for any number of Latin-American
actors, from Gael Garcia Bernal to Javier Bardem, to name two of the
most talented.

Idle speculation, of course; what we have instead is this rather
tasteful, fairly well made melodrama with two passing-strange
performances and a great soundtrack. It's a tragedy and in a weird
way a triumph--we may never see that incredible, impossible
adaptation of Infante's "Three Trapped Tigers," but with "The Lost
City" we have hints and distant echoes of what that film might
actually have been like.

(First published in Businessworld, 9/1/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)