Hate and art have never been linked.
It happened to Andy García and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and that fable that was called The lost city (2005), torn by international criticism.
Here is a sample of what was then said about this film, in this case from the Spanish critic Beatriz Maldivia: “The film is, in short, a series of endless dialogues, poorly written, without links to each other and without any greater purpose for Andy García and Cabrera Infante to perpetrate a kind of essay on Cuba that would be rejected in any children’s newspaper. It is cinematically -not only ideologically- null ».
After extensive publicity during its preparation stage, and the announcement that it would be the most expensive film prepared for the Cuban exile (read counterrevolution), it was released in Miami. Planted, directed by Lilo Vilaplana and scripted by Ángel Santiesteban, Juan Manuel Cao and the director himself.
The theme: to recreate, from fiction, “the gallantry and resistance of Cuban political prisoners in the 60s and 70s against the atrocities of the Castro-Communist prison regime.”
In 24 hours the film was placed on social media, something unusual for a premiere film, and expensive, which would have to continue presenting at festivals around the world to try to sell and raise funds, as it went try to do, unsuccessfully, with The lost city, Rejected here and there by infamous.
Someone on the networks found it strange to drop the film on the fly without recovering a penny and commented: “But why do they do it and not try to make a financial profit?”.
There are two obvious purposes in this hasty roll of the dice: first, to join the subversive campaign against Cuba, presenting a propagandistic and one-dimensional image of the subject they are dealing with, without making references to the causes -not a few of them criminal- who took those men to prison and, secondly, the dream of the filmmakers to think that they have invoiced a great work, able to respond – as they declared – to what The wasp network (Olivier Assayas, 2019), a film that outraged them for presenting true heroes opposed to the commandments of the empire, quite the opposite of the ‘heroes’ who now try to re-float from the past as a message of rebellion », Aimed at generations who did not live in those days.
The trick to rewriting history and leaving the wrong place in the landfill is old: the United States lost the war in Vietnam, but years later had its Rambo, Able to win alone another vengeful invasion and thus give consolation to the nostalgic ones.
The counter-revolution has lost, for more than 60 years, its intentions of reconquest to blood and fire, and maneuvers of all kinds, and now resorts to the usual cat for hare that provides the fiction of a film to rearm, sentimentally , the facts at his convenience.
Already in the artistic field – and the professional critic must give account of it, if it pays some attention to him. Planted allows you to appreciate the negative consequences of a terrible melodrama that confuses narrative times, divides the protagonists into very good and bad bloody, with verbal dialogues that seek effectiveness with each expression, a repetitive script full of commonplaces to the point of fatigue , sensitive music with scenes of beatings and murders in prisons and labor camps that cover much of his nearly two hours of footage; thick strokes of realization marked by the tearful high-pitchedness of the conflicts, and the little craft in the embodiment of a contemporary vengeful act, which owes enough to the worst Hollywood, despite having the film a millionaire budget.
Some lucid minds at the Miami Film Festival, where the film premiered a few days ago, had to realize that Planted he was a nyap and, although they accepted it, they did not give it – according to the director Lilo Vilaplana – the importance that the film deserved.
Vilaplana wrote on his Facebook account that the Festival had given the film “a fifth treatment”, which had not supported it “in advertising or anything; it is a film made in exile, with artists from here, it was for having given it another importance ”.
And indignant – and perhaps also barrunting the artistic failure so painful for any creator – rose the political stoppage: “The disrespect of the Miami Film Festival in historical exile and its complicity with the Castro dictatorship is a ignominy ».
And so that there would be no doubt as to the intentions of the film, he wrote that the organization of the Festival does not like films like PlantedThey “like those who build bridges, who say they need to unite, but the dictatorship is not negotiated.”
He concluded: “These films that invite us to go to Cuba are complicit in the dictatorship, and this regime must be overthrown, because it has done a lot of harm to Cubans … They (the directors of the Festival) do not they wanted the film to be there, and I felt it even in the people who were attending the Festival, they were upset that this film was here ”.
The film will find its audience in a fervent sector of exile and there will be those who promote it as a “revealing work”, without giving credit to the manipulation of the emotions it shows, as a basic principle. of a counter-revolutionary propaganda subject to a subversive plan that does not rest.
But hatred and art have never tied. Good luck in the artistic for the next, director, and undress.