Andy Garcia ("Modigliani") stars and makes his directorial debut in a passionate and historical tribute to his native Cuba. Havana in 1958 is a place of pleasure for many, but others are not happy under the rule of dictator Fulgencio Batista. As the revolutionary forces of Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara prepare to move on the city, Fico Fellove (Garcia)—owner of the city's classiest music nightclub, El Tropico—struggles to hold together his family and the love of a woman (Inés Sastre), not knowing that his club will become more than just a stage for popular entertainment. Observing all is The Writer (Bill Murray) an ex-patriot American who sees Fico being drawn into events as the revolution changes everything. Though Fico watches a culture vanish and a people transformed, it is his love of Cuban music that keeps his memories alive.
The Lost City is actor/director Andy Garcia’s bittersweet lyric celebration of Cuban culture that took him 16 years to make. Using music, literature and dance, City captures Havana in full tropical bloom during the late 1950s.
Where Buena Vista Social Club commemorated an era of Cuban music before it slipped away, City captures the moment where performers like Beny More electrified audiences with that rhythm, a rhythm that made Havana the Pearl of the Antilles.
Scripted by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whom critic David Thomson likened to Jorge-Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marques, City builds like a vivid tropical fever-dream; a love story and revolution set to music.
Centered in El Tropico, a nightclub roughly modeled after Havana’s famous Tropicana, proprietor Fico Fellove tries to hold his family and club together as the dictator Batista’s reign of terror comes crashing down around him. Ultimately, to survive, Fico must leave everything he loves.
City is every immigrant’s story -- a paean to lost culture. It’s a time and place in history that still lives vividly in the imagination of the exile. And as conjured by Infante and Garcia, this is a land where rhythm can’t be exiled. You can leave the country, but the rhythm will never leave you.
Along with its original score, City sings with 40 different songs. Mambos, chachachas, rumbas, toques, danzones, boleros. Together they create an oral history of Cuba. They are love songs to an indomitable culture -- a culture that reveals itself in music, but also in dance, in poetry, in Catholicism, in African and European heritages, in Revolution, in tobacco, in Santeria and the azure sky and water that surround the island.
These are the residents of The Lost City.
Movie News
