The Cuban: Interview/review of a Canadian film that overcame pandemic paralysis by barn-storming the drive-ins
By Jim Slotek
Director Sergio Navarretta was watching his movie The Cuban at the 5 Drive-In in Oakville in late July when the dancing broke out.
“It was a sold-out show, and right in front of me, these girls got on top of their Jeep and started dancing. Some others were dancing out of their sunroofs,” Navarretta recalls.
“It was fun. I knew they were enjoying it. But they were also blocking the view. Which was fine, because I’ve seen the movie a few thousand times.”
Mina (Ana Golja) sneaks Luis (Louis Gossett Jr.) out of the seniors home and into a Cuban jazz club.
It was the kickoff to a pandemic drive-in theatre tour for The Cuban, a touching little Canadian movie with great Cuban jazz music and a soundtrack composed by the Cuban-Canadian pianist Hilario Duran. In it, Louis Gossett Jr. plays Luis, a dementia-stricken seniors home resident and former jazz musician, whose fog only lifts when his caregiver Mina (Degrassi: Next Class’s Ana Golja) sings to him, launching his memories.
The Cuban had just won an audience award at the Pan African Film Festival in L.A., and hopes were high for its theatrical release. Then theatres were shut down as part of the pandemic lockdown. Most Canadian films (and indie and foreign films, and some Hollywood releases) scrapped their theatrical plans and went straight to video-on-demand.
But Navarretta was unwilling to give up the big screens. The Cuban made its Canadian debut at the drive-in at Toronto’s Ontario Place, as the opening film of the Lavazza Drive-In Film Festival, run by the Italian Contemporary Film Festival. Inspired by the reaction, the film barnstormed Ontario drive-in theatres in August, in places like Oakville, Barrie, Newmarket and Stony Creek (it would also head out West to where theatres had reopened in Vancouver, Calgary, Regina and Saskatoon).
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
And the words “sold out,” practically unheard of in the context of a Canadian movie, followed it from drive-in to drive-in.
“It was kind of surreal,” Navarretta says. “In a theatre, I can sit at the back and you can kind of sense the audience as they laugh and cry.
“In a drive-in, it feels like you’re together but not. You don’t know if they’re enjoying it until the honks at the end.”
As for the success under the stars, he says, “I think it was a perfect storm, because the themes represented in the movie were timely, none of us had been out in months, and that certainly gave people the drive to see a movie at a drive-in. It was safe, and you stay in your own bubble.”
The suggestion is that The Cuban made more money playing to cars than it would have in a normal theatrical release – which says plenty about the state of the theatre business, even before COVID. “This transition out of the theatrical experience has been happening for a long time,” Navarretta says. “Theatres have been struggling and they’re not really reinventing themselves. There’s only so many amusement park type things you can stick in a theatre.”
The Cuban began with a dream one of his producers had about meeting his deceased grandfather and asking questions he’d never got to ask about the past. It inspired a short film script that eventually morphed into a feature.
Sergio Navarretta
“One day I was driving, and I listen to jazz a lot, and I don’t know, the music made me think of my love-hate relationship with Cuba, and my relationship with my dad. It all sort of came together.
“My dad came out of the Labour movement, so you can imagine his background and beliefs, and he was enamored with all things Cuba. And we used to debate and argue all the time. So, I went there pouting and wanting to hate it, and the opposite happened.”
The original inspiration, about losing the past, remains. “I think the key is to honour and not scold (people with dementia) or try to drag them to where we are in time and place. And I think a lot of the therapies now are moving toward letting them live in the world that they live in and respect that.”
I mention that the connection between music and memory has played out in real time, with concert documentaries of Glen Campbell and Spirit of the West’s John Mann (both of whom have since succumbed to Alzheimer’s).
Navaretta said he saw Mann and SOTW during that final tour, at an Alzheimer’s fundraiser at a Toronto theatre. It was when we were prepping for the movie, and it really moved me so much to see that, to have that coming-to-life moment right in front of me.”
REVIEW: THE CUBAN
Rating: B
There’s a powerful beating heart at the core of The Cuban, and some distractions that detract from the message. But it’s Louis Gossett Jr. who performs the real magic popping in and out of consciousness and time-traveling in his head.
Gossett is Luis, a mostly catatonic patient at a seniors facility. His young caregiver Mina (Ana Golja) is an Afghan-born orphan, a pre-med wannabe doctor, mostly at the behest of her aunt Bano (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a former Afghani doctor who gave up her career.
But she’s inherited a voice and a love of jazz from her late grandfather. And it isn’t long before her habitual singing awakens Luis. The fact that she knows Cuban jazz tunes has him on his feet dancing, to the consternation of the medical staff who believe sedated-equals-happy.
Soon she’s smuggling in Cuban food and a guitar, and with the help of her boyfriend (Giacomo Gianniotti), unearths Luis’s past as a jazz guitarist who was the talk of New York in the pre-Castro days. In Luis’s mind, we’re back on Havana’s beautiful Malecón, or watching him take bows in a smoky dive.
It’s a resonant story for anyone who’s seen a friend or relative through the loss of the memories that made them themselves. It relates, not just to their loss of memory, but our loss of their memories and of their connection to our past.
Mina’s desire to be a singer against the wishes of her domineering (and even spying) aunt seems more of a trope. Her love life with non-Muslims, and the complexities of possible arranged marriages don’t have the dramatic or existential heft of Luis’s story. As a result, the movie is a little longer than it need be.
But despite its dreamlike moments, The Cuban doesn’t offer any magic wands or unrealistic outcomes – just the sober realization that we all have stories, and most of those stories disappear when we do.
The Cuban. Directed by Sergio Navarretta. Starring Louis Gossett Jr., Ana Golja and Shohreh Aghdashloo. Available via streaming on Friday, Nov. 6 on Apple TV, Bell, Cineplex, Cogeco, Eastlink, Google Play, Microsoft XBOX, Rogers, Shaw and Telus.