IFFK -09 Diary: Tomas Alea’s 'The last Supper' (1976) review

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Cuban cinema does not often deal with religion; it is more at home with Leftist ideals. The pro-Communist subjects have obliterated discussion of major works of cinema by Tomas Alea and Humberto Solas by prominent Western film critics. Alea’s 1994 Cuban  film Strawberry and Chocolate managed to make the final Oscar foreign film shortlist, which is an unusual milestone for Cuban cinema.  Since many Cubans are devout Roman Catholics, while working within a Communist regime any reference to any religion in Cuban cinema has to get official blessings. Tomas Alea, having already made two major films Memories of Underdevelopment and Death of a Bureaucrat, was already a Cuban hero and could afford to play with religious themes.

So Alea decided to make a film using the metaphor of Jesus’ Last Supper with his 12 Apostles by narrating a historical event that took place in Cuba at the end of the 19^th century, where a white slave owner with a conscience decides to wash the feet of 12 of his black slaves and host a lavish dinner for them. The event is timed to coincide with the Passion Week Thursday (or Maundy Thursday).

For the communists, the entire film is a dark tale of slave owners and slaves, of black slaves toiling hard to make their owners rich and powerful. Alea uses the tale as a metaphor for eventual liberation of one slave on Easter Sunday.

Alea, just as another Leftist screenwriter Robert Bolt did in the Hollywood movie The Mission, is able to pinpoint the duplicity of the Church that gave implicit sanction for slavery to flourish. In The Last Supper, Alea seesaws between the somewhat contradictory portrayals of the priest first as a clown and later as more respectable person, if compared to the slave owners. A similar ambiguity can bee seen during the opening credits as the camera first shows religious figures in the clouds but later zooms in on the roses and thorns nearer terra firma. All this is shown with delightful Negro voices singing a spiritual classical chorus.

 In the film, Alea presents three types of the Cuban population, the white slave owners, the black slaves and the colored cross bred population (represented by the sugar miller). Alea’s astute script shows the changes in the perception of all three communities during the Passion Week. Each group is able to resurrect in their own manner on Easter Sunday.

 However, the real high point of the film is the brilliant dialectical conversations between the slave owner and the 12 slaves during the last supper on Maunde Thursday. It is a thought provoking debate on what constitutes real happiness. One slave talks of how he himself sold his father into slavery for the sake of money, and later how he himself was sold as a slave by his own family. Similarly, there is a trenchant reference to Judas and his treachery that deepens meanings.

This Cuban film is arguably the finest work of Alea on par with his black comedy The Death of a Bureaucrat. And since Alea is considered the most important Cuban director this film is the finest Cuban work on celluloid. I was viewing the film at the 14^th IFFK after some 30 years following its screening in Bangalore in the1980 Filmotsav. Alea was present and I had the honor of interviewing him. The film remains a great work and has not paled with time.