>>REVIEW
THE LOST CITY
STARRING Andy Garcia, Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman and Ines Sastre
DIRECTED BY Andy Garcia
Opens Friday, June 30
Uptown Screen
The Lost City is a sentimental ode from Andy Garcia to Cuba, the city he was born in and forced to flee. Garcia’s wealthy family left Cuba when he was five, because of the Castro regime, and the antagonism Garcia has towards Fidel Castro’s revolution is palpable.
The portrayal of cosmopolitan Havana in the late 1950s, with its bustling club scene and beautiful beaches, is lovely. The Lost City, though visually stunning, has the sentiment and overall feel of a five-year-old’s memories of Cuba – both distorted and dreamlike.
Garcia plays Fico Fellove, the son of an affluent and influential Cuban intellectual. Fico is the owner of El Tropico, a Havana nightclub, and the scenes of the club are filled with magnificent Cuban music and exquisite performances. Unlike the apolitical Fico, his brothers, Lois and Ricardo, are both very involved in the revolution. Lois dies a martyr before Castro takes over and Ricardo ends up joining forces Castro and Che Guevara.
After Castro’s regime starts to ensure that the rich will not fare well in the new Cuba, Fico decides to move to New York, where he takes a job as a dishwasher. Of course, there is also a romance. Fico ends up wooing Aurora (Inés Sastre), the widow of his dead brother, and she comes to represent the Cuba he will always love and can never have. Bill Murray provides some comic relief to the film, although his name is never mentioned and his reason for being there is never very clear, and Dustin Hoffman plays the minor role of a Jewish mafioso, Meyer Lansky.
The film, written by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera, gives another perspective on Guevara. While he is often portrayed as heroic, here he comes off as mean and unrelenting. Representing the universal icon as malicious was a brave thing for Garcia to do, and it is interesting to see Guevara painted in a less-than-saintly light. Unfortunately, in a movie surrounded by the elite of Cuba, Guevara and Castro’s main cause is lost, because the poor, who were the supposed beneficiaries of the Castro revolution, are not represented at all.The Lost City is an epic family drama, in the same vein as The Godfather trilogy, but it misses its mark due to miscasting, a biased plot and lack of character development. Where the film really disappoints is in its length – a lingering two hours and 25 minutes. Perhaps Garcia was so attached to his labour of love that his directional abilities were skewed. A viewer gets the impression that the story could have been made strong, had only more editing been done and directional calls been made.
The Lost City tries to tell too many stories at once, and while giving the Cuban revolution a human face is a worthy goal, sadly, none of the characters are fully explored nor do they come to fruition, and so the movie becomes distant and lost. |
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