Such new types of conduct and new methods of pondering are precisely what Gómez brings to mild in her characteristic, “One Approach or One other.” The opening credit trumpet its mix of documentary and fiction, labelling it “A movie about folks, some fictitious, some actual,” after which itemizing a bunch of actors adopted by a bunch of “actual folks.” The characters on the heart of the drama are a younger couple, Yolanda (Yolanda Cuéllar), an elementary-school trainer, who’s light-skinned, and Mario (Mario Balmaseda), a Black employee in a bus manufacturing unit. Their romance is anchored in a dialectical companionship through which they reveal and focus on the tales of their lives—lives that, as Gómez reveals, are deeply established within the political and social practicalities of their neighborhoods and their instances. Mario is embroiled in a battle at his manufacturing unit that’s debated in a staff’ meeting that he takes half in. Yolanda is annoyed by the issue of persuading poor and struggling dad and mom to get their kids to take training severely. In certainly one of a lot of documentary asides, Gómez amplifies Yolanda’s wrestle with sequences that present the demolition of slum neighborhoods and the development of recent housing and which expound on the historical past of proletarian marginalization, rooted, Gómez asserts, within the capitalist necessity of unemployment. The results of this historical past is “inertia”; thus “delinquent attitudes inside the revolution” persist.
Yolanda grew up in an economically comfy house, and her path to her occupation was untroubled. Mario, who grew up poor, grew up within the streets, shirked at college, and “loved life.” Though he managed to win a scholarship, he deserted his research, intent as an alternative on turning into a ñañigo, a member of an all-male, predominantly Black, secret society known as Abakuá. Gómez supplies one other documentary interlude about Abakuá’s historical past—based by previously enslaved Africans, the group later grew to embody the nation’s Creole inhabitants, too—and its position in perpetuating a deep-rooted code of machismo.
Each protagonists have, in impact, centrifugal and centripetal conflicts. Yolanda finds herself more and more at odds with colleagues due to her impatience with poor households’ unshakeable mistrust and anomie. Mario finds himself in a battle between friendship and responsibility. His buddy, an outgoing and womanizing colleague named Humberto (Mario Limonta), leaves work on the false pretext of a household emergency with the intention to go to a girlfriend—and admits his mislead Mario. When Humberto, introduced earlier than the employees’ tribunal, openly repeats the lie, Mario is torn. Humberto pressures him to maintain silent however doing so would imply betraying his communitarian rules. The code of machismo that binds Mario to his buddy—and to his buddy’s arrogantly sexual presumptions—can be a supply of battle between him and Yolanda. At the same time as she should acknowledge her financial privilege with the intention to include her in any other case admirable candor and to strategy her poor pupils’ households with endurance and understanding, she presses him over his macho presumptions. Mario should select between his bubble of male privilege and a brand new, revolutionary consciousness. (One of many movie’s “actual folks,” Guillermo Díaz, a musician, a former boxer, and a convicted killer, performs a serious position in Mario’s enlightenment.) But, to not put too nice some extent on it, “One Approach or One other” is centered on the revolutionary advantage of informing, even on buddies.
If there’s an inherently didactic aspect to Gómez’s intricate interweave of documentary and fiction, it’s nonetheless a sensible didacticism. It displays the prevalence of ideological dialogue in Cuban every day life on the time—in training, propaganda, and in precisely the sort of office debates which are filmed. It additionally feels true to the characters’ mind-sets—the concepts, feelings, and motives (whether or not acutely aware or unconscious) at work of their lives. The type of revelatory artifice is strictly what’s so typically lacking from American films, which, regardless of ostensible naturalism, lack the sensation of genuine contact with actuality—particularly of internal realities—which is so considerable in Gómez’s work.
Getting her begin in movie by the age of twenty, Gómez displayed the advantage of precocity. From an early age, she was concerned within the wider world, coping with professionals and bureaucrats, seeing and negotiating the practicalities of energy, whereas additionally shaping her method, forming her concepts, and increasing her realm of expertise. “My Contribution,” her first nice movie, is thus the end result not simply of a decade of inventive improvement however, much more, the event of a cinematic world of her personal—a complete complicated of themes, tones, kinds, and passions that she may put to the check on this planet at massive. Gómez, together with her mix of documentary and fiction, of drama and mental evaluation, devised a brand new cinematic technique, which she used to specific a strong imaginative and prescient of her nation, her time, and her personal place in each. With its enthusiastic however vital portrait of Cuba’s revolutionary ideology and postrevolutionary order, her work exemplifies a great fusion of analytical, private, and empathetic cinema. It exposes the framework of drama even whereas increasing it and takes a complete but dialectical view of people and society, rendering them not unique however inextricable, not mounted in identification however interconnectedly lively and mutable. Simply as Gómez, having died so younger, is mounted in historical past as without end a younger filmmaker, so her work continues to embody cinematic youth, even in the present day. It’s a youth that few filmmakers working in the present day have attained. ♦
