Spain
3*
Directors:
Various (see review)
Screenwriters:
Various
Directors of Photography:
Various
Original title: 7 días en La Habana
Running time: 129 minutes
Anthology films are often a bad idea. The exceptions to the rule are Paris, je t’aime and New York, I Love You — although, truth be told, they aren’t all that good, either.
7 Days in Havana is the same as most other anthology films: up and down, but mostly down, with only the city to keep it all from falling apart. Well, that’s not entirely true, but, for the large part, the spectrum of tones and approaches in 7 Days in Havana is as varied as the filmmakers themselves are, with almost no attempt to reconcile the different storylines. The list of filmmakers involved in this production is made up of Benicio Del Toro, Pablo Trapero, Julio Médem, Elia Suleiman, Gaspar Noé, Juan Carlos Tabío and Laurent Cantet.
The title says it all: 7 Days in Havana takes place over a week in the Cuban capital, and each day has been assigned to a different filmmaker, with his own cast and crew, though there is nothing to prevent “Sunday” from being “Tuesday,” except for one or two linking themes or character types. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday have scenes set at the fancy Hotel Nacional de Cuba; Monday and Tuesday have mostly English dialogue, while the rest of the film is in Spanish; Thursday and Friday have almost no dialogue; Monday has an LGBT character, Friday has a gay character, and Saturday has a gay character. One actor playing a taxi driver pops up now and again, and a young singer named Cecilia (Melvis Estévez) has an important role in two stories, but, even as a character, the city of Havana is strangely neglected, and the stories all seem to be sadly disconnected from each other.
Judged on their own, some of the episodes are not uninteresting and have some potential, but others have clearly just been added for the sake of completing the simple-minded theme of “seven days, seven stories, seven directors.”
The film starts off on firm footing, as a young actor from California (Josh Hutcherson), who is taking some classes in Havana and has a rudimentary grasp of Spanish, arrives — and we realize it was his point of view over the city that we shared during the opening credits, as the airplane came in to land. As so many tourists before him, he is in Havana to have fun and eventually gets involved with a girl who isn’t exactly what she seems. It’s a nice story, it has the requisite “secret” that is revealed, and it doesn’t drag.
The second story is equally good, though much thinner. In one of the film’s rare moments of comedy, we can hear someone throwing up while we are shown the black screen that always separates one day (and one story) from the next. When there is a cut to the actual scene, Emir Kusturica looks up at us from an underground bathroom in a Havana bar. He doesn’t look good, but the camera follows him — in a dazzling, unbroken take — upstairs, out of the bar, where his taxi driver finds him, puts him in the car and drives him to the hotel while Kusturica phones up his wife in Serbia and makes a drunken plea to her to listen to him. More action continues at the hotel, and everything is followed by the single camera that stays on him. Kusturica has no pretensions about himself or his image, and what we get is such self-deprecation that it is completely disarming and eventually utterly engaging. Little of note happens, but Kusturica is one of the strongest, most interesting cast members of the entire production and whenever the camera is on him, we are spellbound.
The third film is at times laughable, as Cecilia’s voice constantly features on the soundtrack as she sings in sugary tones about love and romance, while she herself is cheating on her handsome Puerto Rican baseball player boyfriend. However, the actress is charming, and it is a relief to find her again in the sixth story.
In the fourth, filmmaker Elia Suleiman takes his usual Buster Keaton–like tack and endures life around him in this strange city with an expressionless face. This episode pokes gentle fun at Fidel Castro, as the movements of Suleiman are punctuated by him coming back to his hotel at various points during the day to find the president on television, still orating at the same podium.
The fifth film, by Gaspar Noé, is a disaster and could potentially be the point at which most viewers flee from the theatre. When a girl’s parents find her in bed with another girl, they send her to be cleansed, and this process — during which she is ritually smeared with oils and rubbed with leaves and undergoes an immersion baptism by torchlight — is accompanied by a seemingly never-ending deep bass heartbeat on the soundtrack. The film is pointless, monotonous and a total and utter waste of time.
The weekend films (days six and seven) are much lighter than the others and benefit from some great ensemble acting. Juan Carlos Tabío, the only Cuban director on the production, made the sixth film, about a hot day in the kitchen, and on the Sunday an old woman gathers all the people in her building to help make real the dream she had about a Virgin Mary statue in her living room.
Some of the films have no respect for the 24-hour timeline, and there is no transition other than a blank screen. Few of them warrant the 15-minute running time they have, and that film by Noé is enough to make you get up and leave. Overall, 7 Days in Havana doesn’t show many sides of Havana, and the superficial sides it does have are only fragments of a very confused production.
Directors (in chronological order):
Benicio Del Toro
Pablo Trapero
Julio Médem
Elia Suleiman
Gaspar Noé
Juan Carlos Tabío
Laurent Cantet