{"id":191628,"date":"2019-01-11T07:11:07","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T12:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=191628"},"modified":"2019-01-11T07:35:33","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T12:35:33","slug":"yuli-the-return-of-the-prodigal-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/opinion\/columns\/republic-of-images\/yuli-the-return-of-the-prodigal-son\/","title":{"rendered":"Yuli: The return of the prodigal son"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Yuli is premiered in Cuba it will be a resounding success. The movie theater will be full of all kinds of catharsis. And applause. It already happened when it was screened during the Havana Film Festival last December.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because Yuli talks about pain. It is inevitable to indicate the bittersweet feeling left by this island version of A Star is Born. Based on the real story of dancer Carlos Acosta, with a script that is a version of his own autobiography (No Way Home), Iciar Bolla\u00edn’s film is a sort of initiation story that involves a process of personal growth, professional success, overcoming of social class and resistance to racial prejudices.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the way, the issue of racialism is decisive. Paul Laverty, its scriptwriter, whose affiliation with political issues and class visions is well-known (especially because of his long-standing collaboration with Kean Loach), stressed it as much as he could in his adaptation of those memoirs. Because the drama – almost the tragedy – of Acosta is having been an exceptional black dancer in a school like that of the National Ballet, whose racial prejudices are an overt secret.<\/span><\/p>\n

The slave ancestors\u2019 suffering, which Laverty uses for the context of the historical colonial trauma of Acosta\u2019s identity, acquires absolute weight in the scene of the journey of the child and his father to the ruins of the sugar mill where his ancestors were mistreated. That sequence is one of the moments where the film emphasizes its profound thesis: we are witnessing a drama of cultural and racial vindication. In that segment, in addition, the discursive, obvious and didactic tone appears that threatens at times to transform Yuli into a thesis film.<\/span><\/p>\n

This aspect is underlined in the most faceted and richest character of the story: Acosta’s father. The parent who forces his son to take the mortifying path of discipline, of the imposition of a must be, is also a self-conscious subject who knows that this is his race\u2019s way out: getting out of the neighborhood, poverty, his destiny as a trucker, a go-getter like any Cuban. And, of course, the departure from Cuba.<\/span><\/p>\n

The father constructed by Santiago Alfonso is woven through few but sufficient resources. Alfonso does not have the chameleonic capacity, always adjusted to the needs of the situation and the scene, which Laura de la Uz exhibits, nor the naturalness of the boy Edison Manuel Olvera, nor of Keivin Mart\u00ednez, who plays the young Acosta. Because the character of the father is the true tragic subject of this story, as well as the enigma of that tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n

With those ingredients, the partiality of Laverty\u2019s script is what prevents Yuli from being a content and revealing drama, but instead becomes an honest melodrama. One with different lines of a story that weaken the strength of the central theme, with dramatic effects almost out of place (the story of madness and suicide of the sister ends up being too overdone, too melodramatic) which divide the interest in several directions and end up – almost – making Acosta’s story that of one more winner.<\/span><\/p>\n