Giovanni Cortez

Contemporary Cuba

Response to “Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas”

In his most elementary intention for the film, I believe that Daniel Díaz Torres’

usage of the fantastic vs. the real is to provoke question, and alternatively, not provide a

clear-cut perspective for the spectator. This notion is very much in the spirit of Alicia’s

temperament; in the film, she often challenges both the absurdity and the passivity of

Maravillas, prompting the people to speak out for their selves. By contorting reality,

Torres uses this madness to zero in on certain issues in Cuban society when interspersing

the madness with the real. He instantly impacts and interests the audience with chaos, but

more importantly uses this extent of exaggeration to conjure up a “super-reality” of

Cuba’s distressed society. Through disfigurement of the real, he creates a consortium

world of many of the Cuban ills and shocks his audience into thinking about these issues

together, an angle they may not have perceived if the absurd is presented separately. In

many ways, the film is deliberate with this device: “In order to drink the water, you must

shake it up”, a motif in the town that echoes this very concept.

Another point I see Torres making with this blurring of reality device is our roles

as functioning members of a society, particularly a revolutionary society. This trait of

Alicia’s, perpetually disputing, tirelessly contemplating, and refusing to conform, is

indicative of the film’s objective itself. As an active viewer of her, as well as the farcical

town she inhabits, we fail to become comfortable and jaded to the insanity of Maravillas

to a certain degree through Alicia’s outlook. Torres’ implores the audience of the film to

constantly scrutinize the madness as opposed to letting it settle in as a norm. We see this

put into effect, as it is never quite clarified if the whole film was a delusion or true
experiences of Alicia. The audience is constantly toeing this line between the imagination

and the actuality, a mostly unsettling composure that elicits very real political

observations masked in absurdity. This unnerving feeling though, is the very purpose of

the reality bending; the uncomfortably is the beginning to rejecting and battling social

ills, the very alternative to laughing as one easily could at this film’s preposterousness.

This feature is very akin to the revolutionary identity and is exemplified in Alicia’s

treatment of the self-serving Maravillians. We experience her taking this journey and

initially become isolated by the insanity constantly commenting on people and

occurrences, but before long she is in a room debating the annual play and where she

argues that creating change is more important than learning history, a revolutionary

concept in and of itself. The film never quite lets up on distorting the reality with the

absurdity, and while absurdity may very well win out in the end, the comment I made

found myself making was “wow, that was weird”, a comment that Torres would be proud

to have produced. He does a successful job at not letting the audience accept absurdity as

conventional and habitual, a dangerous thing that can dissipate our virtues and agency.