Review: Epicentro Wrestles with Our Image of Cuba, Real and Imagined

It alternates political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Hubert Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise.

Epicentro
Photo: Kino Lorber

Hubert Sauper’s essay documentary Epicentro explores some of the filmmaker’s favorite topics, particularly colonialism, apocalypse, and the law of unintended consequences. But while some of his previous films, most notably Darwin’s Nightmare, showed a developing world careering toward catastrophe, this one illustrates something closer to a feedback loop. Although the Cuba he shows here is actively embracing a tourist economy that seems antithetical to the ideals of the 26th of July Movement, that pivot appears to signal less a capitalist future than a return to the island nation’s colonized past.

Sauper starts by asking us to imagine ourselves in 1898 and the explosion that destroyed the U.S.S. Maine in Havana Harbor. He terms that event the “big bang” out of which modern Cuba was birthed. To explain how the tabloid jingoism following the explosion led to the Spanish-American War, Sauper pairs his somewhat slippery narration with more direct, impassioned explanations from the various Cubans (children, an actress, a sex worker) who wander into his elliptically structured film. A pair of young girls stand out even in this vibrantly opinionated cast, their performative zeal as well-honed as their incisive analysis. One girl, who doesn’t seem much older than 10 but who possesses the critical-thinking skills of somebody twice her age, delivers a sharp, on-the-spot political analysis of the 1901 Platt Amendment.

America plays a dominant role in Epicentro as a distant yet still omnipresent bogeyman. Anti-American propaganda seems to wash over the Cubans in the film (we hear a government apparatchik ranting about Washington on a radio in a store with bare shelves and see kids watching old war footage and booing when they catch glimpse of an American flag). Decades of this messaging, however, appears to have somewhat missed its intended target, leaving behind a residue of cynicism rather than a utopian ideal of valorous resistance.

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There’s little evidence of unthinking socialist dedication in the film, with one woman acknowledging in a joking-not-joking way that a policeman who just passed could kill her. But with the exception of some yearning for creature comforts (a woman tells Sauper that she dreams of going to Disneyland), anger at the Cuban ruling clique doesn’t seem to have translated to a widespread belief in America as the best alternative. Many of the Cuban people shown here are presented as stuck between worlds, often living in dire third-world urban decrepitude; the thin Potemkin sliver of restored tourist Havana is as foreign to them as it is to the Westerners zooming around taking selfies in beautifully restored old convertibles.

Epicentro alternates its political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise, which involves him querying various interviewees about their thoughts on utopia. This seems to derive both from the director’s interest in Cuban propaganda, in which moving pictures from Hollywood productions to newsreels functioned as tools, and his seeming belief that Cuba is in some ways a cinematic construction. Sauper intersperses his explorations of street-level Cuba with historical footage as well as clips from movies like Citizen Kane, I Am Cuba, and The Great Dictator that cast an ironic counterpoint on cinematic reconstructions of history. These asides are interesting as far as they go, but the cinematic angle isn’t consistently tied into the overall narrative (one scene on a Havana rooftop appears to be included mostly for the somewhat arbitrary yet charismatic presence of actor Oona Chaplin, Charlie’s granddaughter).

There are times when it can feel like Sauper is simply wandering through Havana with some locals as they talk about the past or cast a crooked eye at tourists. As a result, Epicentro is often best understood as a series of moments which may or may not cohere. However, the benefit of this seemingly at-random approach is that it leaves Sauper more open to catching today’s Cuba as something closer to what it may actually be, rather than what he or non-Cuban viewers had imagined from movies or a friend’s Instagram feed.

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Score: 
 Director: Hubert Sauper  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 109 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

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