Miguel Coyula has emerged as the enfant terrible of Cuban independent cinema whose films have screened at MoMA (Nobody) and Sundance (Memories of Overdevelopment) and are watched underground in Cuba. Blue Heart, his new film, bristles with fierce, feral rage over what has gone wrong with the Cuban revolution. Crowdfunded, it took eight years to complete, with Coyula working as scriptwriter, director, editor, actor, cinematographer, sound designer and music composer.
Coyula’s main appeal is to cinephiles and those who seek a more demanding cinematic experience. He has declared himself an enemy of realism who wants to make “uncomfortable cinema” — and Blue Heart does accomplish this. It lingers in the mind as one continues to decipher its codes long after the screening has ended.
After a frantically edited “stream of consciousness” opening, the film settles down and reveals two main characters, David (Carlos Javier Martinez) and Elena (Lynn Cruz), who are raised in isolation from their family and search for their missing/absentee parents. The cast has a broad dramatic range and provides glimpses of humanity, with revered Cuban film director Fernando Perez appearing as a compassionate psychologist. An explicit sex scene is imbued with ominous foreboding, as are other sequences of alienation and fear.
There is an irreverent rendering of revolutionary icons (Fidel Castro addressing the masses, Korda’s photo of Che Guevara) and deconstruction of political slogans. We learn that “DNA 21,” a genetic engineering project, is being developed in a secret lab, aimed at creating the “Revolutionary New Man.” It is called “the Guevara experiment”. Former presidents Obama, Trump and current Cuban leader Diaz Canel make cameo appearances, sometimes using archival footage and other times modified statements. A Cuban TV anchor provides Brechtian commentaries on the action on screen. He tells us that the genetic experiments have produced failed mutants who have escaped government control. They act as angry, avenging angels who blow up luxury hotels and defy capture. As Dr. Frankenstein discovered (here presented as “Dr. Fredersen”), experiments do fail and specimens escape, creating havoc in the world outside the lab. An actor imitates Fidel’s fits of fury; later that same character is forced to watch his sister’s humiliation.
The film mixes genres and styles, from science fiction to wartime newsreels, expressionist design, melodramatic acting and surrealist references, all serving an elliptical, anarchical narrative that propels the film into unexpected twists and turns. The signs and signals that appear in the film are familiar to anyone with some knowledge of Cuban history, yet also have universal meaning in their portrayal of any authoritarian regime.
Blue Heart is closer to Buñuel and Dali’s Un chien andalous and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis than to more recent sci fi movies such as Blade Runner or Gattaca, but it shares the latter two’s atmosphere of paranoia. The on-screen chaos is, in fact, constructed out of carefully composed, layered images that reveal a new meaning. Coyula intercuts swarming insects, as Buñuel and Dali did with moths and ants. In Blue Heart these are the same radioactive cockroaches that appear in his earlier film, Red Cockroaches. Many more surrealist touches interrupt an otherwise austere aesthetic that emphasizes the grim decadence of Cuba’s crumbling infrastructure.
Coyula uses striking locations, such as an abandoned nuclear power plant near the city of Cienfuegos (it became a memorable set in Carlos Quintela’s The Project of the Century) and the Havana Art Institute with its brick domes and circular patios. Language is deceitful: a bureaucrat uses euphemisms to disguise government censorship, appearing to sympathize with the artist while banning his work. The art student’s portrait, ironically titled “A National Hero”, is reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s hollowed masks, and is replicated in the artist looking through a keyhole. Coyula is also an animator and revels in manipulating images, such as circling vultures in the Cuban skies (recalling Gutierrez Alea’s Death of a Bureaucrat) and chimneys spewing fire, or a discarded, half-eaten guava reminding us of the frailty of human flesh. These symbols of decay and environmental degradation become a leitmotiv throughout Blue Heart, as the plot delves deeper into the meanings of identity, belonging, and the existential choice between conformity and rebellion.
The mostly electronic music includes the haunting lyrics “all in the same prison cell” sung by Cuban punk rocker Gorki Aguila. He is dressed in the uniform worn by Cuba’s primary school children, who proclaim allegiance to Che Guevara every morning with the words, “we shall be like Che.” The rock riffs interrupt the narrative as micro videos within the film. Japanese animation and Soviet epic films also appear on the screens of home TV sets. Coyula’s use of extreme close-ups and black and white shadows are throwbacks to a range of genres, from the darkest noir to kitschy cartoons.
Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing, sound: Miguel Coyula
Cast: Lynn Cruz, Hector Noas, Fernando Perez, Carlos Javier Martinez, Aramis Delgado, Eric Morales, Gabriela Ramos, Jeff Pucillo, Felix Beaton, Miguel Coyula
Producers: Miguel Coyula, Lynn Cruz
Production design: Lynn Cruz
Music: Dika Chartoff, Ivan Lejardi, Porno Para Ricardo, Sinfonity, Miguel Coyula
Production companies: Producciones Piramide (Cuba)
World sales: Habanero Film Sales
Venue: Guadalajara Film Festival (Official Competition, Iberoamerican Feature Films)
In Spanish, English
104 minutes
