Julie Gavras’ debut Blame It on Fidel was one of last year’s film highlights for me. Like The Squid and the Whale it traced the impact of a set of parents’ liberal 70s lifestyles on their children. In TSATW it’s a pair of sons dealing with the aftermath of their parents’ sexual liberation. In Blame It on Fidel, we get a heroine, eight-year-old Anna, facing the upheavals provoked by her parents’ political activism.

At the start, Anna is wrapped up in a cosily conservative world represented by her convent school, her toy plastic shop and her comforting housekeeper, exiled from Cuba and bristling with resentment against the bearded lefties responsible. The meat of the story follows Anna as these steadying forces are disrupted and gradually replaced in her life, and her engagingly stubborn vulnerability ensures that the film is lifted above its occasionally literal plotting.

One scene perplexed me at first; Anna has gone to visit the old family house in Spain with her grandfather. In the chapel she silently looks up at the figure of Christ. Is she meant to have noticed that this icon, promoted and loved by her nun teachers, was neither a capitalist nor clean-shaven? Perhaps she’s thinking that Christ is a bit like Che, maybe even that Che is a bit like Christ? Unsettling thoughts, even if you’re not eight.

I expect all the T-Shirt-, poster- and Tray-makers in the world have noticed that it’s only Che, and his fellow third world superstar, Bob Marley, who possess faces that rival Christ’s in popularity but I don’t suppose they spend much time thinking about the reasons why. Do filmmakers? Somebody at Channel 4 must have thought about it because they chose to screen The Motorcycle Diaries on Christmas Day (Personally, I’ve always had leprosy and humble transport down as Easter themes). I cannot accept the theory that this is simply a beard thing.

Mulling it over, I’ve decided that while Che might grab the points on the martyrdom front, I reckon Marley pips him in the broader Christ-like Figures Of The 20th Century category. Firstly, his thoughts have been more effectively dished up in snappy doses and secondly, Lee Perry is the best John the Baptist that ever kept his head. Doubters are referred to the Marley documentary, Time Will Tell. Check out the photo of his mysterious father: is that an angelic uniform or what?

CJ Magnet

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