DEATH OF A BUREAUCRAT Movie Review

La Muerte de un Burocrata

This early work from Cuba's foremost filmmaker, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, is the witty and sharply funny story of a man whose efforts to dig up and rebury the corpse of his uncle lead to a bureaucratic nightmare of epic—and comic—proportions. Alea was to use a similar comic metaphor (trying to move a corpse) as the basis of his final film, the 1996 Guantanamera!, but with a gentler, more resigned, more melancholy tone than he uses here. Death of a Bureaucrat is more of a flat-out slapstick farce with political underpinnings, which pokes fun at red tape, regulations, and “official policy” that flies in the face of common sense; it's an eternally frustrating aspect of modern society that is hardly unique to socialism.To paraphrase the classic Levy's Rye Bread ad, you don't have to be communist to enjoy Death of a Bureaucrat.

NEXT STOP … Memories of Underdevelopment, Guantanamera!, The Trouble with Harry

1966 87m/B CU Salvador Wood, Silvia Planas, Manuel Estanillo, Gaspar de Santelices, Carlos Ruiz de la Tejera, Omar Alfonso, Ricardo Suarez, Luis Romay, Elsa Montero; D: Tomas Gutierrez Alea; W: Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Ramon Suarez; C: Ramon Suarez; M: Leo Brower. VHS NYF, FCT