She makes sure her tight t-shirt gets wet as she washes her clothes she may be coy but she’s fully aware of the effect she has on her young neighbors.
The film opens in 1994 with a pair of young Cuban boys at the top of a rickety building in Havana pleasuring themselves to the sight of a voluptuous neighbor who’s all too happy to indulge her admirers. ‘La granja.’ Courtesy of Miami Film Festival These are steamy, overtly sexual attempts at rewriting official history. Villaronga and Rodriguez have history in their mind, but their films seem more preoccupied with what happens de la cintura para abajo. Offering a decidedly different look at Cuban history, Agusti Villaronga’s El rey de la Habana ( The King of Havana) and Jessica Rodriguez’s Espejuelos oscuros (Dark Glasses) give voice and screen time to characters and stories that too often are found at the margins. That is also the case in the two Cuban historical films playing at the festival which weave sex and death together while reframing the storied history of the Caribbean island. But just as with his other characters, which include a boxer in the making and a middle-aged woman hoping to get pregnant, the body is put on full display here, with sexual desire bubbling up even amidst a world full of violence and death. The sex tape, of course, becomes a crucial piece of the puzzle Soto is careful to lay out, kickstarting the fateful ending to which the film builds towards. Unlike the glossy post-coital scenes we usually get in Hollywood, both characters here are overheated and soaked in beads of sweat - it’s clear they enjoy being caught on camera, it adds to the experience. It’s a scene that sets up the central focus of the film (Sara, as we learn, is an addict, her boyfriend a dealer) but which luxuriates in the naked bodies of its two performers. Young couple Sara and Bryan (Yulianna Padilla and Marcos Carlos Cintrón) enjoy a heated sexual encounter while being observed by a carefully placed camera across their bed and by Sara’s younger brother who’s peeping from the other side of the door.
You really can’t deny the impact those three words have had on Latin American cinema this past decade and a half (besides being the actual title of a 1999 Mexican film.) At the Miami Film Festival this year, for example, those first two (sex and shame, and lack thereof) took center stage in ambitious films that used them to tackle larger social issues.Īngel Manuel Soto’s La granja ( The Farm), for example, may read like a Puerto Rican riff on Amores Perros given its focus on the drug trade via a series of interlocking stories, but its most exciting and transgressive scene is the sex scene at its opening.
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