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• W4243614405 abstract "Reviewed by: El techo by Patricia Ramos Laimir Fano (bio) El techo. Patricia Ramos, 2016. JNV Productions; Mar y Cielo Producciones. 75 mins. “Boy, restlessness does not exist.” This line opens El techo (“On the Roof”), a film in which characters seem condemned to a permanent state of inertia. Yasmani takes care of his doves and spies on his sexy neighbor; Vito, a dark-skinned Cuban, dreams of going to Sicilia to live with the relatives of a European grandfather he never met; and Anita patiently waits to give birth to a baby of an unknown father while secretly loving Yasmani. These three friends spend most days hanging out on rooftops where they talk, play, eat, and imagine a financially prosperous and fulfilling future without actually doing anything to realize it. The characters’ lack of motivation informs a narrative as stagnated as their lives. In the first half of the film very little happens. All the action is displaced to distant times and locales. Stories about the economic success of a neighbor who left for the United States or the adventures of an Italian immigrant in pre-revolutionary Cuba are told by the friends but never enacted for the camera. In the second half of the film, an unexpected twist in the story—the decision to open a pizzeria on the rooftop—brings some excitement to Anita, Vito, and Yasmani. But the small business doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Scarce resources and a clientele that does not always pay frustrate the prospect of change introduced by the idea of becoming entrepreneurs. The lack of dramatic action is compensated with a detailed exploration of the characters’ interiorities. Like El patio de mi casa (2008)—an earlier short film in which Ramos contrasts the aimless everyday existence of a housewife and her elderly parents to their wildest dreams—El techo potentiates the characters’ [End Page 223] sensorial perception by displaying extreme close-ups of tactile quality. However, unlike in El patio, where evasive fantasies are narrativized as vision-scenes, in El techo the subjectivities of the characters are represented in a more indirect way through a mise-en-scène that subtly foregrounds the significance of the space. Rooftops have appeared as locations in several contemporary Cuban films. In Madagascar (Fernando Pérez, 1994), people standing on the top of tall buildings utter the name of a distant country as an expression of their desire to escape the bleak reality of Cuba’s special period. In Ernesto Daranas’s Conducta (2014) el techo is the space where the young protagonist experiences a sense of liberation, and in Regreso a Itaca (Laurent Cantet, 2014) old friends gather at la azotea to reexamine past experiences. Ramos’s film uses the spatial configurations of the rooftop not only to confer a surreal quality to the characters’ business operations—like manna coming from the skies, the pizzas are delivered from the eleventh or twelfth floor with baskets tied to long ropes—but also to articulate a tension between freedom and confinement, between alienation and belonging. El techo anchors the characters to the city and, at the same time, detaches them from their surroundings. On the one hand, it gives Yasmani, Anita, and Vito access to nearby patios and a privileged view of what occurs below that allows them to critically reflect on their neighbors’ lives. On the other hand, the openness of the rooftop exposes their actions. To hide from the aggressiveness of the tropical sun or from scrutinizing gazes, the three friends create spaces of intimacy by hanging damp sheets from tendederas (clotheslines) around them. Moreover, the location’s proximity to the sea makes possible the inscription, in many of the shots, of the island’s marine border and cargo ships coming from abroad. The presence of foreign elements that allure the characters is also echoed in the film’s soundscape through the juxtaposition of Cuban melodies and Italian musical instruments. El techo offers a candid and unprejudiced look at a young generation of Cubans grappling with the social, economic, and political transformations that the country has undergone in recent years. [End Page 224] Laimir Fano University of California, Santa Cruz Laimir Fano Laimir..." @default.
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• W4243614405 date "2018-01-01" @default.
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• W4243614405 doi "https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.2.2.22" @default.
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