La Tropical (review)

Through their focus on music, artful documentary films about Latin American popular culture such as Wim Wenders's Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Fernando Trueba's Calle 54 (2000) have transcended the limited commercial appeal of ethnographic films and of documentary film generally. Sublimating a cultural focus to a musical one—or eschewing cultural context altogether, as does Calle 54, with its emphasis on in-studio performance—these films have achieved success on the film-festival circuit and in wider theatrical exhibition and video sales and rentals.

In La Tropical, David Turnley's documentary about a Cuban dance club (the Salon Rosado at La Tropical), the emphasis is on race, class, and culture. Music is largely the catalyst for the discussion of Cuban culture and the lens through which the film views that culture. Turnley's film includes some curious generalizations from its interview subjects. "There are no problems here," claims one speaker. "Let the world know that Cuba's doing well." Despite the lack of critical commentary on such statements, the film offers many complex political and cultural arguments. Rather than functioning solely as a signifier of cultural richness and festivity, music in La Tropical permits the articulation of both compelling and objectionable points about Cuban, Third World, and postcolonial culture.

The film includes short interviews with popular Cuban performers, including members of the groups Los Van Van and La Caro Band, juxtaposed with brief performance clips. Its focus, though, is on the club's patrons and performers, nearly all of whom are black and working class. Included are professional dancers and enthusiastic amateurs, Yoruba practitioners, septuagenarians who have been patronizing the club for decades, a destitute white flamenco guitarist, and dancers and patrons wrestling with family and child-rearing responsibilities. These latter include a professional dancer with a young daughter, who the film follows to school; the Caro sisters' family, which includes a young sister with cerebral palsy, through whom the family subtly promotes Cuba's socialist health-care system; and a young man who complains about his unsuitability for parenthood, thus speaking volumes about the machismo to which young Cuban men cling. Overall, the range of age and tastes surveyed is striking, hinting at a utopian vision of community all the more transfixing given Cuba's crumbling infrastructure, its colonial legacy, and its persistent racism and sexism.

Turnley, who directed, photographed, and executive-produced the film, won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1990 and has produced photo collections of his work in South Africa under apartheid, in Eastern Europe just before the fall of communism, and in wartime Bosnia, among other hot spots of investigative journalism. The film bears the look of artistic photojournalism, for better or worse. The richly textured black-and-white cinematography lends visual significance to the film's content, but at the risk of freezing its working-class characters as striking compositional elements rather than fully realized historical subjects. In two sequences, montages of still images appear, restricting the film's political and cultural focus in favor of a principally formal one. The filmmaking sensibility is clearly that of a photographer rather than a cultural historian or ethnographer. Artful images abound, sometimes producing the aestheticization of poverty that makes Buena Vista Social Club both alluring and troubling. Viewers may feel similarly drawn in by La Tropical, enjoying its surface appeal while losing sight of the complexities and contradictions of its subject.

In its emphasis on dance culture, the film's other troubling formal choice appears. Turnley frequently positions the camera at waist level to film female subjects gyrating furiously, and a chest-level position also captures many of the film's well-endowed female subjects. Although working-class dance culture in many nations tends toward tight clothing and suggestive movements, particularly for women, the film's interest in this aspect of popular dance crosses the line into objectification. Many of the male dancers appear...