Cammy Reagan; Guantanamera

I found this film to be very entertaining. It had a common recurring theme for all of the movies we have viewed this quarter...long lost love. As with Tita and Pedro in Like Water for Chocolate, Candido waited for Yoyita to return to him, when she finally returned and they were about to revive the long lost love they had for one another, Yoyita passed away. As with the other films, family plays a huge part as shown with the closeness Gina felt toward her Aunt Yoyita. She was very distraught when she passed away. The other recurrent theme in these films is the macho men, who make all the rules for the women to follow and obey. When they don't do as the husband wishes, they are beaten and made to feel less than human. Adolfo was a very macho man. He was intent on being right and completing his job of delivering Gina's aunt to her grave in Havana no matter what the cost would be. He had visions of greatness and actually daydreamed of a statue of himself being worshipped by others. His affinity toward "greatness" was ultimately the demise of his marriage to Gina, who was expressing her independence from him by purchasing a dress that he did not approve of, as well as her wanting to be her own woman and express her view regarding all of the travel and transfers of caskets in order to reach the final destination of death and the grave, which was pretty comical to me. The mere fact that it seemed to take DAYS to get to Havana for Aunt Yoyita's burial. And then there was Mariano, a long lost "forbidden" love for Gina. (He, too was quite the womanizer as we have seen in several of the films we have screened.) A student that fell in love with her while taking her class, leaving her a note to find expressing his love for her. They lost contact when she stopped teaching and married Adolfo. When they bumped into each other, they both felt the love they had for one another rekindle. They finally reached their final destination when they rode off in the rain on a bicycle, of all things. There were also some things in this film I noticed...the selling of stalks of bananas and bags of garlic when they stopped at small towns. The music was very Hispanic, the salsa style. The rituals that also surrounded the truck driver Ramon with blowing smoke on the tires and inside the truck to ensure safe travel I think were pretty common for this culture. This film was fun to screen!