A Successful Man (Un Hombre de Éxito)
September 2007 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Midway in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II is a scene set in Havana. Mobsters, corrupt American businessmen and politicians eager to deal with them, and the greedy Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista slice up a cake shaped like a map of Cuba. But it’s 1959 and Castro’s revolution sends them running. Although we’ve heard plenty about Castro since, most of us know little more than this of the lead-up to the Cuban Revolution. A Successful Man is a complex, artful film that covers the three decades that immediately precede Castro's revolution, starting in 1932 when the dictator Gerardo Machado fell. The film moves from one dictator to another, following the story of two upper-class brothers -- Dario, who dies in his struggle to liberate Cuba, and the greedy, opportunistic Javier, to whom the ironic title refers.

A Successful Man won the Grand Prize at the Havana Film Festival in 1986 and was the first Cuban film considered for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Directed by the eminent Humberto Solás, it is one of a series of classics released as the Cuban Masterworks Collection, originally produced through Cuba’s internationally renowned film school, ICAIC, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos.

Castro’s revolution threw out more than Batista and his American cronies. Expelled as well was the dominance of Hollywood over Cuban movie houses. Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Marquéz is a Colombian novelist who has a home in Havana and an acquaintance with Castro. Both are devoted to cinema. In the mid-1980s, they happened to be together when the idea of a Cuban film school was first proposed and together they heartily endorsed it. Now film students from all over Latin America attend, and Hollywood directors like Coppola and Spielberg and Soderbergh are enthusiastic lecturers there. The prestigious Havana Film Festival annually premieres films from all over Latin America.

We have been led to expect only Communist propaganda from Cuban media, but that would be to believe our own country’s propaganda. British film critic Michael Chanon, writing for Jump Cut (1/18/03), says of ICAIC that in recent years it "has built up a reputation for technical excellence while losing something of its original inspiration, which came from the politically committed cinema of the movement known as el nuevo cine latinoamericano." He goes on: "A new trope has entered the vocabulary which distinguishes between political critique (legitimate) and ideological opposition (unacceptable). In other words, Cuban socialism has opened up to renegotiating political life while remaining firmly dedicated to socialist principles." That is, no collapse of socialism into capitalism is imminent, and neither are Hollywood-style escapist films.

The DVD transfer looks a little battered, and the sound is only stereo. But the movie is full of arresting images of the opulence and decadence that led to Revolution -- glamorous nightclubs, lavish parties, beautiful clothes, and period cars, set against rising unrest. The cast is large, and the acting is superb. The score is a wonderful mix of period popular music both Cuban and American. The plot is complex, and the subtitles do not dummy it down for the American audience. It was not a movie made for Americans; it presumes an audience with a shared understanding of the tumult that political corruption and foreign intervention have brought to Cuba.

The bonus materials include a photo gallery and a text-only biography and filmography of Solás. Most interesting is a short from the ICAIC archives called "The History of the Cha Cha Cha in 1950s Cuba."

An intense film that requires close attention, A Successful Man is a fine introduction to Cuban cinema.

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