By Jay Carr, Globe Staff. Boston Globe 6/9/2000
The Spanish-speaking Americas have embraced surrealism. We, instead, have chosen irony as our dominant mode and arguably are the poorer for it. Fortunately, films like ''Life Is to Whistle,'' from Cuba's Fernando Perez, arrive from time to time to remind us of the imaginative richness we're
missing. ''Life Is to Whistle'' is a wonderful film, which is not to say that it's a perfect film. But its allegorical and surrealistic flights persuade us that they're a serendipitous delivery system for the film's passion and fancifulness. Although it's fictional, and ''The Buena Vista Social
Club'' was a documentary, they have in common Havana's enchanting pastel-tinged sunsets and a richly musical pulse, in this case provided by the music of Buena Vista Social Club role models Bola de Nieve and Benny More.
''Life Is to Whistle'' is a film of healing but impish energies. Again, echoing a similar scene in ''Buena Vista Social Club,'' it begins in an orphanage with children happily clapping hands and dancing to the buoyant music of an aging virtuoso. In a flash, we are drawn into the lives of three
of those children grown up. We soon become acutely aware that the film sits on the cusp of long-awaited liberating and terrifying change that's in store for Cuba in the twilight of the Castro era. The money we see changing hands is dollars, not pesos. Couples sit atop a sea wall, necking. But people
also swirl in the street and corkscrew to the pavement in a faint whenever they hear the words that trigger their fears. In the case of Claudia Rojas's Julia, an attendant in a home for the aged, the word is sex.
She meets a therapist, but it is by no means certain that she can overcome her inhibitions. In the case of Elpidio (Luis Alberto Garcia), an idler who occasionally fishes, he's hamstrung by his feeling that his surrogate mother, Cuba (I told you the film was allegorical!), abandoned him because
his shiftless ways caused her to tire of him. He has turned his yearning for love into a superstition, having built a life-size Santeria-like statue of Cuba from straw and cloth. He keeps it in his room, waiting for a sign from Cuba that he has reentered her embrace. Meanwhile, he meets and falls
for a tourist, a marine biologist working for Greenpeace. He's afraid of heading into a romance with an English-speaking gringa, but he pushes ahead, fighting his uncertainty and, on a larger front, his fetishized mother fixation.
Coralia Veloz's Mariana, on the other hand, has grown into a sensual dancer and an even more sensual woman. Attuned to the body and its language, she follows her impulses and her urges. But when she gets a chance to star as Giselle, she visits a religious shrine and makes a deal with God. If she
gets the role, she'll give up sex. Naturally, she falls for the new dancer imported to perform as her lead. Her yearning and suffering make her performance transcendent. With Mariana, the question is what and how much she will sacrifice in recommitting to her art. Veloz's face is a dam about to
burst with emotion. But then there's an almost overpowering force of yearning in all three grown (but only chronologically) orphans.
There also are patterns of fatefulness, handled in a charmingly light-handed way. But ''Life Is to Whistle,'' which cheerfully quotes John Lennon and Ho Chi Minh, finds lots of room for yearning. It's filled with rain and water and other symbols of life. There's a benevolent ghost as well, and a
magical taxi driver who sees that the right paths cross, with a motorized assist here and there. There are times when the film's allegorical component becomes perhaps a shade too obvious. But its energies and spirit are so refreshing and so beguilingly rendered that I'd hesitate to tamper with its
ecology for fear of losing the magic. ''Life Is to Whistle'' is a film about renewal from a country that's on the brink of renewal. It's here through Sunday. It's worth juggling your schedule to see it. And if you liked ''Buena Vista,'' you'll like this soundtrack, too.
This story ran on page D5 of the Boston Globe on 6/9/2000.
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