So still tied at #169, this is a movie about post-revolutionary Cuba, made in Cuba in 1968. The obvious question I had was: Is there like a censorship board in Cuba at the time, such that this movie has to be a giant propaganda piece? And the answer is: yes, there is. And what’s more, the guy who directed this movie, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, was one of the people who founded it. So, okay, this is going to be a huge propaganda piece, right? Well, yes and no.

The movie opens in 1961, after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion; a bunch of Cuba’s old elite is fleeing for Miami, including our protagonist’s parents and (now ex-)wife. He’s staying behind because… well, not for any real reason, exactly. He’s not a committed revolutionary, he’s not some ultra-patriotic Cuban, he just doesn’t seem to want to leave. (And, it becomes clear over the course of the movie, his relationship with his wife was rocky, so their separation is a feature, not a bug, for him.)

So we’re going to live with this remnant of the pre-revolutionary elite as he piggles aimlessly around. He’s currently living off the income from rents on property his family owns (a fact that will not be true by the end of the movie, after government officials have an interview with him about this), but he tells himself that he wants to be a writer, and now that his wife is gone, he can get serious about his writing. He never really does, though.

What he mostly does is get horny about nearly every woman he sees. He has a whole elaborate fantasy about his house-cleaner, he narrates about how hot (or not) various women on the street are, and eventually he picks up a young woman who wants to get into movies, promising to introduce her to a friend of his who works in the studio. They make their way back to his apartment, and have another of those confusingly-consensual sex scenes, where she’s literally running away from him and squirming out of his grasp… but also laughing about it, and teasing him playfully, so I guess it’s just a game?

Anyway, they have sex, and then it turns out that while this was just a fun little diversion for him, she’s taking it seriously — it’s not clear if she was a virgin before, but she’s young and inexperienced and this is still (apparently, sorta — it seems like there’s a cosmopolitan elite culture and a more traditional culture of the regular people) one of those societies in which a woman can be “ruined” by having casual sex with a random guy.

So okay, he grudgingly makes her his girlfriend. We then see them go on some dates (including to Hemingway’s house, now a museum) where he voice-over narrates his contempt for her, and ultimately just ditches her.

We then have a bit of flashback to his first love; I actually didn’t realize that it was a flashback at first, so when he’s picking her up outside a high school, I was just like… yikes, dude, that’s creepy even for you. But oh right, his hair isn’t gray here, he’s also in high school, okay. This memory causes him to consider in maudlin fashion how his life might have gone differently if he hadn’t focused on his career instead of this girl, and how he imagines that he might now be happy with her. (He wouldn’t be, of course; he’s an inherently miserable person.)

Anyway, the girlfriend he ditched? Now her brother comes to his house to threaten him, for luring her back to his apartment and taking her virginity like a cad. This escalates into a sit-down with the girl’s whole family, who try to persuade him to marry her, wailing and moaning about how she’s ruined otherwise, and threatening him with the law if he doesn’t.

But he won’t — he just got out of one miserable marriage and doesn’t want to start another — and so we end up in court, where he is now being accused of rape. Since we saw this scene, we’re pretty sure he’s innocent of that crime, but also we now find out that this girl is like seventeen, so I guess he was metaphorically hanging around outside the high school at his current age. He’s convinced in narration that he’s going to lose this case, because everyone hates elites now and he’s clearly unsympathetic. But in fact, he wins… which sets him off on more self-recriminations, because he knows he’s been a shit, and sort of feels like he should have been punished even if he’s not actually a rapist.

The next crisis of the movie is a larger one, the missile crisis of 1962. And here we get a lot of newsy stuff, and ominous build-ups of weaponry — one of his creepy habits earlier in the movie was to use a telescope to check out sunbathing women by the pool, but now he uses that telescope to look at missile launchers that are being wheeled into place. The tension builds, and… THE END.

So okay, this seems to be pretty straightforwardly propagandistic, right? This guy represents the old elites, and he’s just a garbage-tier human? Yes, but the thing is that Alea is too good to make such a simple movie. Throughout the film, he’s also meeting up with his other, more sympathetic, rich friends; he also narrates about how Cuba has changed since the revolution, and there really is a sense of loss, of something that was beautiful having disappeared from the world.

Even a revolutionary could watch this movie and feel like the revolution was not an uncomplicatedly good thing, and that a kind of sophistication and openness that used to mark Cuba had disappeared. The guy’s an asshole, but he’s not wrong about this.

(And also, the movie opens with a street festival, wherein government officials shoot down a guy for unclear reasons. I think from context, he’s supposed to be a counter-revolutionary, but anytime your movie has government officials shooting a guy at a street festival, it’s fair to say that it’s not fully doing propaganda for that government, even if you work at the propaganda department.)

The end result is a movie that ends up feeling like a portrait not just of this one shitty dude, but of this time and place, Havana after the revolution. It’s interesting and complex, and comes from a perspective that I, at least, haven’t seen too much of. It feels like it would have landed very differently in 1968 (when the events it’s depicting were about as far away as COVID is for us) than it does now as a document of history; but I suspect it works in both the present and the past tense. Either way, from where we are today, it’s easy to see why this made top ten lists.