The Brief and Brilliant Career of Sara Gómez
Such new forms of behavior and new ways of thinking are exactly what Gómez brings to light in her feature, “One Way or Another.” The opening credits trumpet its blend of documentary and fiction, labelling it “A film about people, some fictitious, some real,” and then listing a group of actors followed by a group of “real people.” The characters at the center of the drama are a young couple, Yolanda (Yolanda Cuéllar), an elementary-school teacher, who is light-skinned, and Mario (Mario Balmaseda), a Black worker in a bus factory. Their romance is anchored in a dialectical companionship in which they reveal and discuss the stories of their lives—lives that, as Gómez shows, are deeply established in the political and social practicalities of their neighborhoods and their times. Mario is embroiled in a conflict at his factory that’s debated in a workers’ assembly that he takes part in. Yolanda is frustrated by the difficulty of persuading poor and struggling parents to get their children to take education seriously. In one of a number of documentary asides, Gómez amplifies Yolanda’s struggle with sequences that show the demolition of slum neighborhoods and the construction of modern housing and which expound on the history of proletarian marginalization, rooted, Gómez asserts, in the capitalist necessity of unemployment. The result of this history is “inertia”; thus “antisocial attitudes within the revolution” persist.
Yolanda grew up in an economically comfortable home, and her path to her profession was untroubled. Mario, who grew up poor, grew up in the streets, shirked at school, and “enjoyed life.” Although he managed to win a scholarship, he abandoned his studies, intent instead on becoming a ñañigo, a member of an all-male, predominantly Black, secret society called Abakuá. Gómez provides another documentary interlude about Abakuá’s history—founded by formerly enslaved Africans, the group later grew to encompass the country’s Creole population, too—and its role in perpetuating a deep-rooted code of machismo.
Both protagonists have, in effect, centrifugal and centripetal conflicts. Yolanda finds herself increasingly at odds with colleagues because of her impatience with poor families’ unshakeable distrust and anomie. Mario finds himself in a conflict between friendship and duty. His friend, an outgoing and womanizing colleague named Humberto (Mario Limonta), leaves work on the false pretext of a family emergency in order to visit a girlfriend—and admits his lie to Mario. When Humberto, brought before the workers’ tribunal, brazenly repeats the lie, Mario is torn. Humberto pressures him to keep silent but doing so would mean betraying his communitarian principles. The code of machismo that binds Mario to his friend—and to his friend’s arrogantly sexual presumptions—is also a source of conflict between him and Yolanda. Even as she must recognize her economic privilege in order to contain her otherwise admirable candor and to approach her poor pupils’ families with patience and understanding, she presses him over his macho presumptions. Mario must choose between his bubble of male privilege and a new, revolutionary consciousness. (One of the film’s “real people,” Guillermo Díaz, a musician, a former boxer, and a convicted killer, plays a major role in Mario’s enlightenment.) Yet, not to put too fine a point on it, “One Way or Another” is centered on the revolutionary virtue of informing, even on friends.
If there’s an inherently didactic element to Gómez’s intricate interweave of documentary and fiction, it’s nonetheless a realistic didacticism. It reflects the prevalence of ideological discussion in Cuban daily life at the time—in education, propaganda, and in exactly the kind of workplace debates that are filmed. It also feels true to the characters’ mind-sets—the ideas, emotions, and motives (whether conscious or unconscious) at work in their lives. The sort of revelatory artifice is exactly what is so often missing from American movies, which, despite ostensible naturalism, lack the feeling of authentic contact with reality—especially of inner realities—which is so abundant in Gómez’s work.
Getting her start in film by the age of twenty, Gómez displayed the virtue of precocity. From an early age, she was involved in the wider world, dealing with professionals and bureaucrats, seeing and negotiating the practicalities of power, while also shaping her technique, forming her ideas, and expanding her realm of experience. “My Contribution,” her first great film, is thus the result not just of a decade of artistic development but, even more, the development of a cinematic world of her own—an entire complex of themes, tones, styles, and passions that she could put to the test in the world at large. Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both. With its enthusiastic but critical portrait of Cuba’s revolutionary ideology and postrevolutionary order, her work exemplifies an ideal fusion of analytical, personal, and empathetic cinema. It exposes the framework of drama even while expanding it and takes a comprehensive yet dialectical view of individuals and society, rendering them not exclusive but inextricable, not fixed in identity but interconnectedly active and mutable. Just as Gómez, having died so young, is fixed in history as forever a young filmmaker, so her work continues to embody cinematic youth, even today. It’s a youth that few filmmakers working today have attained. ♦
