Recently in Havana, Cuban officials at ICAIC (the government film office) showed a group of visiting American screenwriters a new Cuban film. The island is agog with the expectation of gauging popular American reaction when the film is screened at film festivals in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
Titled Plaff!, a Spanish onomatopoetic rendering of Splat!, the film also bears another title, Demasiado miedo a la vida (Too much afraid of life). It is reminiscent of Italian comedies of the fifties and sixties, as well as of a Cuban film, Death of a Bureaucrat, made in the early sixties by Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Interestingly enough, Plaff!'s director, Juan Carlos Tabio, is a protege of Gutierrez.
Basic Black Comedy
The story, basically a black comedy, manages to portray the eternal feminine, cutting across frontiers and cultures, as well as to present a funny and somewhat critical picture of contemporary Cuba. The criticisms of the society will appear more obvious to Cubans than to foreign viewers, but some of the details are as sharp and precise as tiny razors.
Concha, wonderfully played by Daysi Granados (for the last three decades a leading Cuban actress), is a widow whose only son, a star baseball pitcher, marries Clara, a scientist working for a state laboratory. Concha loathes her daughter-in-law with a passion. She also can't stand her neighbor across the street who'd had an affair with Concha's late, philandering spouse. And then the eggs start landing--plaff!--almost hitting her, at the oddest moments, day and night. But who is throwing them?
Parallel to Concha and her problems with the mysterious egg-thrower is a plotline about daughter-in-law Clara and her discovery of a superpolymer developed from pig excrement (a little dig at the pretentious industrial and agricultural projects of the commandante-jefe Fedel Castro). Clara's efforts to get her discovery approved and put into production--a product that will supposedly save the Cuban economy thousands of dollars--are disparaged by her bosses. Introducing a new product, argues her immediate boss, would mean he would have to spend too much time getting authorizations and "everyone knows the government never makes a fast decision."
Bureaucratic Paperwork
A file cabinet appears in a crowded office. The director of the office dictates an angry memo to have the offending cabinet removed (every time he enters his office he bangs his head on the file). Eventually the cabinet is removed, but in its place is a mountain of paper--the memos he's dictated for its removal. So the last we see of that particular character is a scene with him dictating a memo calling for a file cabinet to hold his memos. Not that funny perhaps for most Western audience, but fairly pointed for a society awash in bureaucratic paperwork.
Another scene that reflects some of the harsher realities of daily life for the average Cuban was based on director Tabio's own frustrating experience in trying to exchange a defective watch. The scene features heroine Concha as a by-the-book sales clerk explaining to an elderly gentleman that if he exchanges his watch, which broke down five days after he
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