The first full-length film by young producer and scriptwriter Carlos Lechuga was released in the Yara movie theatre in Havana. As part of International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema, Melaza (Molasses), competes in the Debut category.
Lechuga, a graduate of the International School of Cinema and Television of San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV), was previously known for his success as scriptwriter in films like: Club Habana, winner of the Award to the Unpublished Script in the International Festival of Poor Cinema; and The lost Eden, winner of the Award of the Public in First Malaga Television Festival.
He learnt from film makers Humberto Solás and Juan Carlos Tabío, and now he is one of the members of the Producciones 5ta Avenida Company (Alejandro Brugués, Inti Herrera, Claudia Calviño) that presents, in this occasion, a humanist movie that recreates life in an old sugar mill.
The history develops in the little town of Melaza that has stayed in crisis after the closing of the sugar mill. Aldo and Mónica make a young married couple that tries to survive in this context where the human values begin to disappear.
In the cast stand out Yuliet Cross, Armando Miguel Gómez, Lucho Gotti, Ann Gloria Buduén and Carolina Márquez.
In the gala of the premier the director expressed his gratitude to the persons who made the movie possible: “I am grateful to the festival and to the young people for being here (…) what we wanted was that the movie was seen here”.
The sweet of Melaza becomes bitter to us as the plot advances. The title itself takes us to the physical reality and becomes ironic. There is nothing “bitter, but sweet” in Melaza since the frustration reaches all its leading characters with the same intensity.
Aldo (Armando Miguel Gómez) with his youth faces the role of head of household, of trying to support a family with his teacher’s salary. The Adonis of the telenovela Aqui estamos, takes his first steps with great confidence.
On her part, Mónica (Yuliet Cruz) from her experience of being a single mother has learned to be strong before life. She plays this characters quite well, as she did in very well let’s not forget, although in tone of comedy, his performance in the movie Habana Eva and in the play Aire Frío.
Melaza shows its story linearly, with an identical tempo to the stagnation of the life of the town and of those who inhabit it. The solutions they look for to the economic crisis: the rent of the house, the selling of the grandmother, the theft, up to Mónica’s “deliverance”. The script could have used other tools, but in this one they conjugate correctly without bordering on the melodrama. The director had very good judgment on having stayed away from these manipulations.
This story constitutes the culmination of his essay previous, the short story Los Bañistas (The swimmers). The movie presents the story with a background, the head office that has closed and the economic instability that it generates in the place. Everything and the satire is not absent in the set phrases constructed by the old official rhetoric. At times, it seems that you are watching the final act of The stepdaughter by Cuban producer and playwright Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti in which every personage was carrying a cartel: “Out of order”, “In maintenance”. The movie searches into dysfunctional aspects and the frustration: of the characters only? when the economic factor bursts tangentially into their lives.
There are several interesting thematic sub-axes as the relation between the girl and the stepfather and the versions the grandmother makes of Mónica´s breaking off with the father of the small one. The opinion of the grandmother (Ann Gloria Buduén) is archaic. She imposes the vision of which “the important thing is that a dish of meal was not absent in the table”, for her “not to follow the lead of the mother”. Chauvinist constructions, manipulations the grandmother makes of the thoughts of the girl.
The thesis cannot be that love with time turns into money; it must spare a minute for poetry that is in a scene like that of Aldo and Mónica in the bathtub.
She returns from the hardest battle she has ever fought to fight against herself, suppress her disgust – and he cleans her skin trying to tend to her soul. The couple stands on much more than money. Lechuga gave us a few minutes of complicity and we are grateful for that.
It does not matter if Melaza is a made-up town, the circumstance is real and apparently the director has established certain commitment with his present. We only need to highlight great photography by Ernesto Calzado and Luis Franco portraying a rural landscape and making great of the outdoors.
Also, we must praise the excellent work by Alain Ortiz in the art direction. We know his previous deliveries-Penumbras, Aire Frio and his capacity to provide movies with identical ambience to the sensation of asphyxia that the characters suffer. From this point of view, the canes first offer information about the physical space, head office, and then they acquire a symbolic function. It is already not the distinctive sign of a territory, but the space that catches and suffocates the characters. Melaza as debut is a worthy movie. We hope to see more of Carlos Lechuga.
