Guantanamera

As bittersweet and gently ambling as the traditional ballad of its title, Guantanamera, the final film from the late Tom‡s GutiŽrrez Alea (with Juan Carlos Tabio), celebrates life, loss, love, and mortality -- a fitting farewell from the director of Memories of Underdevelopment and Strawberry and Chocolate. It's a masterfully routed road movie in which the parallel journeys of two discontented souls intersect with ingenious coincidence. Suffused with the ethereal light of the Cuban countryside and brimming with the warmth, vigor, and tenacity of its people, Guantanamera is a hymn to passion, tolerance, and faith with only an occasional sentimental sour note.

The power of love over distance and time resonates from the film's beginning as Aunt Yoyita (Conchita Brando) returns to visit her hometown of Guant‡namo and her old flame Candido (Raœl Eguren) after an absence of 50 years. In a superb switching of tones typical of Alea's touch, the romantic pathos of the lovers' embrace turns to black humor as her swoon proves fatal.

Aunt Yoyita's death is ill-timed in other ways. Her niece Georgina (Mirtha Ibarra, Alea's widow) is married to a bureaucrat named Adolfo (Carlos Cruz) who's as anal-retentive and tyrannical as his Nazi namesake but not nearly as charismatic. Adolfo has just devised a fuel-saving hearse-relay system for transporting corpses. Since Yoyita has to be sent from Guant‡namo to Havana for burial, she gets passed like a baton from one town to the next the whole length of the island. Chauffeured by the cynical government driver and part-time smuggler Tony (Luis Alberto Garc’a Novoa), Georgina, Adolfo, Candido, and the late Yoyita set out on their macabre picaresque.

Meanwhile, Mariano (Jorge Perugorr’a), an engineer compelled by hard times to drive a truck, also has to leave town -- to escape his latest romantic entanglement. A dour philanderer, he felt true love only once -- as a student of Georgina when she taught enlightened Marxist economics at the university. Now their paths cross insistently, brought on by manifestations of their unhappiness with their present condition. Whenever Mariano deceives a roadside one-night stand, or Georgina submits to Adolfo's abuse and insensitivity, a detour crops up in their course, ending in another chance meeting between the two, another recognition that what's missing from their lives is each other.

Some have complained that the politics are a little soft in Guantanamera. In fact, the political commentary is subdued but wry. "Then they called it scientific communism," notes a character on the changes in state policy. "Now it's scientific socialism. Soon it will be scientific capitalism." And the story can be seen as a parable of Cuban politics, with the resurgence of a more humane and idealistic socialism (Mariano and Georgina) abetted by tradition (Candido) and apolitical opportunism (Tony) overcoming hardline oppression (Adolfo). But Guantanamera's delights elude ideological categorization. Its dialectics involve not materialism but the imagination and desire. At the Kendall Square.

-- Peter Keough