CORPORATE LINE: The Lost City is actor/director Andy Garcia’s bittersweet lyric celebration of Cuban culture that took him 16 years to make. Using music, literature and dance, City captures Havana in full tropical bloom during the late 1950s.
Where Buena Vista Social Club commemorated an era of Cuban music before it slipped away, City captures the moment where performers like Beny More electrified audiences with that rhythm, a rhythm that made Havana the Pearl of the Antilles.
Scripted by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whom critic David Thomson likened to Jorge-Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marques, City builds like a vivid tropical fever-dream; a love story and revolution set to music.
Centered in El Tropico, a nightclub roughly modeled after Havana’s famous Tropicana, proprietor Fico Fellove tries to hold his family and club together as the dictator Batista’s reign of terror comes crashing down around him. Ultimately, to survive, Fico must leave everything he loves.
City is every immigrant’s story—a paean to lost culture. It’s a time and place in history that still lives vividly in the imagination of the exile. And as conjured by Infante and Garcia, this is a land where rhythm can’t be exiled. You can leave the country, but the rhythm will never leave you.
Along with its original score, City sings with 40 different songs. Mambos, chachachas, rumbas, toques, danzones, boleros. Together they create an oral history of Cuba. They are love songs to an indomitable culture—a culture that reveals itself in music, but also in dance, in poetry, in Catholicism, in African and European heritages, in Revolution, in tobacco, in Santeria and the azure sky and water that surround the island.
THE REVIEW: Andy Garcia wanted to create an epic—too bad he fell way short. Why Garcia doesn’t pull it off we don’t really know—maybe it’s because the film lingered unmade for years. Perhaps it’s because he both acted and directed. Something stopped this movie from being the great vision Garcia surely had.
Sadly, The Lost City is far too long. Maybe it seems longer than it is because the story never moves along at any kind of decent pace. The dialogue is another story altogether. It tries so hard to be smart and talk in metaphor but ends up being more confusing and not at all enlightening.
THE EXTRAS: Commentary by director Andy Garcia, actor Nestor Carbonell, and production designer Waldemar Kalinowski starts off the extras. There is a “Making of The Lost City” featurette which explores the set design and story. There is plenty of nice behind the scenes footage. There are deleted scenes with commentary added for good measure and a still gallery.
+ Charlie Craine
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