EARLY IN THE ALLURING, bittersweet Sin Alas (Without Wings, 2015), there is a shot as mysterious as a passage in Jorge Luis Borges or José Lezama Lima, the writers that inspired filmmaker Ben Chace’s memory piece about love and loss in a city where past and present soon will be obliterated by the tidal wave of capital that is its future. High above the cluttered cityscape of Havana, the camera captures a pigeon soaring and circling to land inches from the lens. A reasonable explanation: The bird is a homing pigeon and its coop is probably on the roof where Chace and his ace cinematographer Sean Patrick Williams have stationed themselves. If, however, you suspect that bird and camera are secret sharers of a vision beyond the human, then this is a film for you.
Chace’s first feature, Wah Do Dem (2010), which he codirected with Sam Fleischner, also explored a Caribbean island culture (in that film, it was Jamaica) by combining documentary and fiction with energizing local music. His follow-up, Sin Alas, was shot entirely in Cuba before bans on travel and commerce had been lifted to the extent they are today. The film began as a documentary about Cuban literary magical realism and then mutated into a subjective fiction about an elderly former journalist, Luis Vargas (Carlos Padrón), whose long-repressed memories of his passionate affair with a married dancer come flooding back when he learns of her death. But Chace’s original objective—to capture the Cuba of crumbling Spanish-style nineteenth-century architecture, 1950s American cars, and triumphant revolutionary posters, together with vibrant street life of Havana—informs every scene.
Like Havana and rural Cuba as well, Luis’s mind is mapped with memory. Past mixes with present as he walks about the city, finding the mansion where his lover lived with her husband, a military honcho in Castro’s government; the theater where he saw her dance; the park where they secretly met. Sin Alas is exceptional for its temporal fluidity, and for the ingenuity with which Chace brings the past—Cuba both before and after the revolution—convincingly to life on what must have been a miniscule budget. Luis’s passionate encounters with his lover and the melodrama of the triangle in which they were caught, are like scenes from Latin movies of the 1940s. In memory, the actuality of the romance is inseparable from its romantic archetype and even more deeply repressed childhood memories. Late in the film, Luis visits the town where he grew up, Hershey, named for the American chocolate factory where his father was a manager. His purpose is to find the deed that gives him legal rights to his rambling Havana house so that he can leave it to a young couple who for complicated reasons have no place of their own. But he also discovers the origin of his obsessive love for the dancer in his memories of the maid who worked for his parents and was his forbidden object of desire.
Padron, a venerable Cuban stage actor, gives an affecting performance, as does Lieter Ledesma, who portrays Luis as an earnest young journalist, more in love with love than revolution, but perhaps most anxious to save his own skin. Sin Alas is not a political film; rather it shows how people’s lives are defined by personal relationships on which political systems have little effect. As for Cuba, it’s a different matter. We will be grateful for Chace’s evocative souvenir once Walmart, Amazon, and Chase come to town.
Sin Alas plays through Wednesday, May 11 at the Metrograph in New York.
