Hatred and art are never linked.
It happened with Andy García and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and that hoax that was mentioned The lost city (2005), gutted by international critics.
Here is an example of what was said about that film at the time, in this case of the Spanish critic Beatriz Maldivia: «The film is, in short, a series of endless dialogues, poorly written, with no ties to each other and without much. that Andy García and Cabrera Infante are continuing a sort of essay on Cuba that would be rejected in any journalistic newsletter for children. It’s cinematic – not just ideological – zero.
After extensive publicity during the preparation phase and the announcement that it would be the most expensive film made by the Cuban exile (read counter-revolution), it was released in Miami Planted, Directed by Lilo Vilaplana and scripted by Ángel Santiesteban, Juan Manuel Cao and the director himself.
The theme: recreate, from fiction, “the bravery and endurance of Cuban political prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s in the face of the atrocities of the Castro communist prison regime.”
Within 24 hours, the film was posted on social networks, something unusual for a premiere film, and expensive, which should be presented at festivals around the world to try to sell itself and get money back, as was tried, without success, with The lost city, here and there dismissed as infamous.
Someone in the networks thought this detachment of launching the movie on the fly without getting a penny back was strange, commenting, “But why are they doing it and not trying to take economic advantage of it?”
There are two clear goals with this hasty roll of the dice: first, to join the subversive campaign against Cuba, by providing a propaganda and one-dimensional view of the topic they are dealing with, without naming the causes. – not a criminal couple – who led those men to jail and, second, the filmmakers’ vain dream of thinking they billed a great job that was able to – as they stated – respond to what became exposed in The Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas, 2019), a film that enraged them for presenting true heroes who were against the commandments of the empire, the exact opposite of the ‘heroes’ who are now trying to revive from the past as a ‘message of rebellion’ , addressed to generations who did not live those days.
The ruse to rewrite history and leave what is inappropriate in the garbage dump is old: the United States lost the Vietnam War, but years later it had its Rambo, able to win a vengeful invasion herself and thus provide nostalgic consolation.
The counterrevolution has lost its intentions of recapture by blood and fire and maneuvers of all kinds for more than 60 years, and now it resorts to the well-known all-rounder offered by film fiction to reassemble the sentimental. facts at hand, your convenience.
Already in the artistic field – and professional critics will realize, if they pay attention – Planted allows us to appreciate the negative consequences of a terrible melodrama that confuses the narrative times, divides the protagonists into good, very good and bloody bad, with verbal dialogues that search for effectiveness in every expression, a repetitive script full of ordinary exhaustion, corny music, and scenes of beatings and murders in prisons and labor camps that take up much of the nearly two hours of footage; thick realization lines drawn by the tearful heights of the conflicts and the small job in the epitome of a contemporary act of vengefulness that owes much to the worst of Hollywood, despite the film’s millionaire budget.
Some bright minds at the Miami Film Festival, where the film was released a few days ago, must have realized that Planted It was a mess and although they accepted it, they – according to director Lilo Vilaplana – didn’t give it the importance the film deserved.
Vilaplana wrote on his Facebook account that the festival had given the film “a fifth grade treatment”, that it had not “endorsed him” in advertisements or anything, it is a film made in exile, with artists from here. , it should have given it another importance ».
And indignant – and perhaps suspecting the artistic failure so painful for any creator – he lifted the political parade: “The Miami Film Festival’s disrespect to historic exile and its complicity with the Castro- dictatorship is disgraceful. “
And so that there would be no doubt about the intentions of the film, he wrote that the festival organization does not like films like PlantedThey “like those who build bridges, who say they must unite, but with the dictatorship there is no negotiation.”
And he concluded: «Those films that invite you to go to Cuba are complicit in the dictatorship, and that regime must be overthrown because it has caused a lot of damage to the Cubans … She (the directors of the festival) did not want that the film was there, and I felt it even in the people attending the festival, they were angry that this film was there ».
The film will find its audience in a fiery sector of exile and there will be no shortage of those promoting it as a ‘revealing work’, without honoring the manipulation of emotions it displays, as a basic tenet of counter-revolutionary propaganda. subject to a subversive plan that does not rest.
But hate and art are never linked. Good luck with the art for the next director, and say hello.