"Lucia" Cuban Epic Of Love & Revolution

LUCIA. 1969. Black and white. 160 minutes. Directed by Humberto Solas. Brought to Ann Arbor by the Friends of the Ann Arbor SUN and showing at the Modern Languages Building. Saturday Nov. 30 at eight o'clock. $1.50.

It may sound improbable to an audience afflicted with wealth and inflation, Post-Watergate suspicion and the diverse cynicism that life in America breeds, but Lucia manages to pull all stops in the grand tradition of love and revolution. After years of blockade by the U.S government Humberto Solas' 1969 epic Cuban film is about to make its Mid-west premier in Ann Arbor thanks to the New World Media Project and the Ann Arbor SUN.

Solas' picture is about the relation between emotional life, political milieu and revolution. Three Lucias, played by different actresses, love and struggle through successive junctures in Cuba's history -- during the war against Spain in the 1890s, under the Machado regime in the 1930s and in the revolutionary Cuba of the '60s.

Each hour long episode is strikingly different from the others. "Lucia 1895" is acted and scored like an opera. Like an opera it rolls to crescendos of romance and violence. The over-contrasted photography is as black and white as love and war, and as antique and doomed as the crinoline and lace Heroine. The first Lucia (Raquel Revuetta) is an upper class spinster who falls in love with a handsome counter-revolutionary spy and reveals the hideout of her guerrilla brother.

The next episode is quieter and more restrained, less a seething volcano than a dream of love between terrorists. Lucia 1933 (Eslinda Nunez) is a middle class adventuress who falls in love with a mild intellectual named Aldo. Aldo tommy guns servants of the ruling class; Lucia goes to work in a sweatshop, scrawls "Down with Machado" on latrine walls and becomes pregnant shortly before Aldo dies during an assassination.

Decadent Havana between the wars is filmed like a documentary. A scene where police on horseback break up a street march is full of running, bleeding and weeping and distills all the confusion of urban warfare. The grey and white half tones are so delicate that the dank urban humidity practically forms droplets on the screen.

Both Lucia 1897 and 1933 have the grainy feel of sorrowful photo albums out of a past gone forever. Their bourgeoise nostalgia is in jarring contrast to the communist commitment of the third.

Lucia "1960" is a Punch and Judy parable about a jealous husband who upsets a collective and stalls the revolution by refusing to allow his bride to cut sugar cane along with the rest of the women. The third Lucia (Adela Legra) is a true Castro heroine, robust, sensual and dark; the camaraderie and buffoonery of the Cuban proletariat is turned against machismo as a sort of penance for past sins.

This is the happiest of the episodes, shot in wide-open sunlight as is befitting the victory of the Cuban revolution. But even after the enemies with guns have been overcome, the enemies without guns still have to be struggled against. So the cultural revolution, the great literacy campaign and the struggle to free women from the clutches of machismo and sexism. This is how the movie ends. with a revolutionary Lucia struggling with her man for dignity and independence.

SEE LUCIA