This City was gone

Thoughts on Andy Garcia's The Lost City, posted elsewhere but recorded here:

(1) Andy Garcia is his usual stiff and uncharismatic self (Soderbergh exploited this for comic effect in the Oceans 11 movies). If he flirted this openly and clumsily with my sister-in-law, I'd have stuck a trumpet up his ass.

(2) The film is a honeyed reverie: gorgeous nonsense, like Sastre's mooing after Garcia. Reminded me at its best of Hou Shiao-Shien's talent for presenting moments of chronological incongruity so as to stress the tension between memory and nostalgia.

(3) In the film Batista is much more than a preening met (and much less: he's like John Gielgud in Caligula). He runs a secret police! His goons shoot suspects in the head after an unsuccessful interrogation! He's got man-tits!

(4) Garcia the director is rather good when instructing the actors to tease and ricochet the good Cuban novelist Gabriel Cabrera Infante's purple dialogue -- initially (a tense scene between Dustin Hoffman's Meyer Lansky and Garcia). In the last third it gets ridiculous. Sample: "Havana is like a rose. It's got petals and thorns, but you still want to hold her close."

(5) Bill Murray?!? WTF?

(6) Jonathan Rosenbaum: "Cabrera Infante had a nuanced sense of how the Cuban revolution soured, not a simplistic set of cold war reflexes—his criticism of the idealized radical icon Che Guevara is a lot more complicated than this film’s."

(7) Once you accept the Garcia character's passivity as an unintentionally ironic portrait of what my grandparents' generation was like -- apolitical bourgeosie who rather disliked Batista but lacking the imagination to realize that their comfort couldn't stand a chance against Cuba's unstable history -- this synthesis of Casablanca, The Godfather, Part II, and Reds is okay to pretty good. There's rather too much music (it's excellent though). Questioning its verisimilitude is as fruitful as questioning the more repulsive The Motorcycle Diaries' depiction of Che Guevara-as-Henry-Fonda (this is a good demurral).