Baby Steps

⋆⋆ Memories of Underdevelopment Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1968; The Criterion Collection

• DVD/⋆DEBUT

• BLU-RAY/⋆ DEBUT

‣ STREAMING

‣ EXCLUSIVE TO VOD

THE RASPS, CRACKLES, AND HALOING REMEMBERED FROM previous viewings of Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomas Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 masterpiece, seemed to confirm the backwardness that so exhausts Sergio, the film’s protagonist, who nevertheless chooses to stay on in postrevolutionary Cuba as his friends, parents, and wife leave for Miami. Now, for its 50th anniversary, Memories of Underdevelopment has received a glorious 4K restoration. The late Sergio Corrieri, who played a revolutionary in Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 I Am Cuba, is this film’s bourgeois protagonist, and in crisp, glowing black and white his performance can be fully appreciated as a tour de force. His taciturn elegance and the sensitive pain in his eyes make him hard to resist or to judge.

Though still in his twenties when the film was made,