Cuban neurosis: Jorge Perugorría arrives on the Malaga competition | Cinema: premieres and evaluations | EUROtoday

An epidemic of neurosis has damaged out in Cuba and an previous Havana neighborhood cinema goes to be closed on account of issues in its building construction. A lady who in her youth dreamed of being an actress and who, hit by the circumstances of her life and the intolerances of her time, noticed her aspirations annoyed, lives a depressing existence, devastated by her specific neuroses. Then this unfocused girl, already within the last curve of her existence, decides to steer the struggle to save lots of the previous projection room the place she has labored for years as an usher for spectators, as a result of that bodily and non secular area has grow to be the one mild in her life. That girl, by the way in which, known as Enlightened.

Jorge Perugorría, acknowledged for years as an actor due to his performances in Cuban, Spanish and Latin American movies, arrives this time on the twenty ninth version of the Malaga Film Festival sporting his second finest go well with: that of director of Anonymous neurotica piece that could be a tribute to cinema and, on the similar time, a robust metaphor for up to date Cuban life.

Produced by the Cuban Film Institute and with a script by Perugorría himself and the actress Mirtha Ibarra (who performs Iluminada), this new proposal by the actor/director comes to determine what may already be thought of his aesthetic: comedies with a bitter style that, below the mantle of irony and typically absurdity (which can be a manifestation of actuality, as we Cubans know effectively), displays conflicts and expectations of the sophisticated up to date island society, that’s, of “the thing”, as one of the characters in the film calls it. “The thing” that is always difficult and that, by the way, can always get worse, as we are seeing right now.

As Perugorría himself admits, this film is located in the wake of two of his previous works, chronic love (2012) y for sale (2012). And, like those, it pays tribute to the teachings of the two Cuban directors with whom Perugorría trained as an actor: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, under whose direction he debuted in the now classic Strawberry and chocolate (1993) and returned shortly after to star in Guantanameraa black comedy in which the roots of this cinema appear, which Perugorría later directed.

The use of absurdity and mocking irony serve in this film to penetrate a social context devastated by shortcomings and restrictions on the will of citizens. The neurosis epidemic that sweeps the country is a manifestation of a social state plagued by daily tensions and the sequences that take place in the Neurosis Research and Control Center, to which Iluminada refers, are full of tangential (and not so tangential) readings of the reasons that triggered the plague. Treatments to know how to behave in queues, to deal with the recurrence of blackouts or to say goodbye to those who are leaving are much more than games with logic or normality: they are some of the sources that generate the nervous illness already considered a pandemic.

But the social perspective of the work is also permeated by a greater metaphor: that of assuming cinema, its aesthetics, fiction and interpretation as a refuge for the spirit and even a way of understanding life. The fight to save the movie theater from the demolition process—which, by the way, is called Cine Cuba—then becomes the raison d’être of the film’s protagonists and serves the director to create a warm tribute to this artistic manifestation.

Thus, in the footage of Anonymous neurotic There are references, quotes and recreations of classics of universal cinematography, with iconic scenes from films such as Amarcord, The sweet life, The Passion of Joan of Arc y The dark side of the heartor of Memories of underdevelopment, by Gutiérrez Alea, to reach a referential closing sequence, a recreation of Chaplinesque modern timesadorned by the splendid music of José María Vitier, which will leave the viewer with sensations and emotions similar to those provoked in us by that extraordinary tribute to the power of cinema that is the Cinema Paradiso, by Giuseppe Tornatore.

And though it’s already recognized that in artwork what issues and decides is the inventive results of the work and never the circumstances by which it was produced, filming Anonymous neurotic With the minimal sources accessible to the manufacturing, it was an nearly heroic act: not directly, an act as romantic and decided as the aim of Iluminada and her companions to save lots of Cinema Cuba and permit individuals to proceed to look out, to look out once more at that great expertise that’s the enjoyment of cinema. And that’s, undoubtedly, the good benefit of Jorge Perugorría and his staff, who, in fact, should have handled a whole lot of neurosis to venture this story that, in any case, is a love story… neurotic.