At Second Glance: Social Club Buena Vista ***

A scene from At Second Glance: Buena Vista Social Club.

 

By Jordan Levin, The Miami Herald

If the recording, movie and musical/cultural phenomena Buena Vista Social Club was the greatest triumph of Cuban nostalgia, this documentary is a sad, verging on bitter, follow-up. German director Carsten Moller goes to Havana in search of the real Buena Vista Social Club, where the aging musicians made famous by Ry Cooder supposedly once gathered. What Moller finds is a forgotten place in a neglected neighborhood, where nostalgia and dreams of the future are buried by carelessness about the past, a lack of resources and diminished hopes.

''A lot of time had to pass before we understood that not everything old had to be destroyed,'' says cultural organizer Tato Quiñones. ``Many things that were useful and necessary and authentic and rooted in the people.''

The movie opens with filmmaker Wim Wenders admitting that in making his famous documentary on the musical group he never found an actual Buena Vista Social Club. Random interviews on the Havana streets don't turn up anyone who has heard of it either. Eventually Moller finds Buena Vista, a dilapidated, mostly black neighborhood of small homes. But most of the residents have never heard of a local club or even the famous record.

The filmmakers finally locate the rundown home that once housed the black social club, where the elderly couple living there -- former members -- proudly show off its humble, vanished glories. The directors turn up more neighborhood characters: Ariel Sanchez, who teaches Afro-Cuban dance to kids and has been waiting years for a teaching certificate; the frustrated Quiñones, who tries to educate BV residents on their culture and history; rapper Juan Amado, who complains that ''people here don't seize opportunities''; Yolaine Céspedes, who lives in a single room with her mother and thinks her neighborhood would be perfect if it only had a dance club.

As the filmmakers uncover the club's history -- it turns out that famous son musician Arsenio Rodriguez wrote a song about the club and neighborhood -- the disparate characters slowly join together to reopen the club. They're not clear why: to create a place for Ariel's students to dance and the community to gather, to give themselves a sense of importance and possibility.

Unlike so many films on Cuba that take a resolutely left or right wing stance, At Second Glance: Social Club Buena Vista allows people to speak thoughtfully. One elderly woman says she doesn't miss the racism that created clubs like Buena Vista. Quiñones regrets that Havana's many dancehalls have all but disappeared. But the sometimes-rambling discourses on a situation that these people don't entirely understand -- and won't criticize outright -- can make the film as vague and tedious as these people's lives.

At the end, the Buena Vista Social Club opens for one celebratory party. Then all the hope and air goes out of the movie. A final sequence informs us that the club soon closed again, while the people we've met either leave Cuba or remain stuck in dead end lives.

Famous nostalgia can't bring the future back to life, not in Buena Vista or in Cuba.

Director/screenwriter: Carsten Moller

A Cinezara Films release. Running time: 81 minutes.In Spanish with English subtitles. In Miami-Dade only: Cosford. A discussion panel with the filmmaker will follow the screening.

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