Chico and Rita meet in a Havana club. He plays the come-on-strong would-be lover. She plays hard to get.
But the attraction between them is undeniable — not only through romance, but through music. She’s a talented singer. He might be the best piano player in Cuba. They both have heads full of ideas and ambitions. They know they’re better as a team.
Sometimes their passion is too much for them. And meanwhile, they’re living through one of the most tumultuous periods in their country’s history. Will they get what they want?
The 2010 film Chico and Rita — the subject of the latest installment of Animation Celebration, an ongoing monthly discussion of animated movies hosted virtually by Haley Grunloh, technical assistant at the New Haven Free Public Library — tells the story of two Cuban musicians who fall madly for one another and try to navigate the cutthroat world of the music industry in pre-revolution Havana, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. It’s a story about race and class and ambitions delayed and deferred. But it’s also a deeply personal story of two lifetimes and the people entangled within it, all set to the blazing music of a small island nation that, time and again, has managed to captivate the world.
To open Monday night’s discussion of the film, Grunloh noted that a team of three Spanish directors — Tono Errando, Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal — worked on Chico and Rita. For Trueba, it was “his first time working on an animated film.” Previously he’d done live-action films and documentaries — some about the history of Cuban jazz. Grunloh said that Trueba had remarked that in making live-action films, “there’s way more opportunity to make last-minute decisions on things…. He said it was really interesting to work on a film where you had to plan everything out really carefully.”
Chico and Rita was also the first film for Mariscal, “a well-known Spanish artist and illustrator,” Grunloh said. Mariscal started out in comics and graphic novels and branched out into sculpture and graphic art. Mariscal and Trueba also “co-own a jazz club in Madrid.”
Which brought Grunloh to “the other really important creative mind” in the making of the film, Bebo Valdez, a Cuban pianist and bandleader born in 1918 who eventually emigrated to Europe. “He was important to the development of Cuban jazz,” recording 20 albums, and winning seven Grammy awards. Chico and Rita “was one of his last big projects before he passed away in 2013.” Trueba had connected with Valdez while working on a previous film, and the setting of Chico and Rita “is very much based on the world he lived in,” Grunloh said. “Chico sort of resembles Valdez in his younger days,” and “whenever you hear Chico playing, that is Bebo Valdez playing piano.”
Grunloh also found out that in developing the film’s visual style, the filmmakers were “incredibly meticulous about getting the details right.” Every place in Havana is a real place. The artistic team visited the city, took videos, looked at archival photos. “They wanted it to be real and to come to life, and capture this time period.” Trueba recalled that “when they showed this film in Cuba, older people could recognize these places from their childhood that didn’t really exist anymore.”
As for the story itself, its drama and heightened emotions are no accident. The filmmakers “wanted it to mirror the themes in Latin ballads called boleros,” which “tend to be about love and nostalgia, and dramatic heartbreak…. They wanted it to be a movie of a bolero song.”
Grunloh then asked the dozen or so attendees what their first impressions of the film were. One person said that her family was from El Salvador, and “I recognized a lot of those boleros. They did an excellent job of recreating the pictures I’ve seen of Cuba. They even have the Cuban accents down. They really made the city come alive. You could tell they put all the detail in.”
Grunloh agreed. “It’s a relatively long movie — more than 90 minutes — and any shot, you can pause it and notice they drew every little street sign in the background.”
Though another participant noticed that a similar accounting for detail did not go into the American segments of the film. It referenced, for example, intersections in New York City that don’t exist. “They were less picky on the details,” she said, “but the details were amazing, and the fluidity of the characters and the movement and the cars — and the car accidents — it was amazing.” Adding to the verisimilitude were cameos by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Cuban musician Chano Pozo (who emigrated to New York and was killed there, apparently over a dispute about being sold some bad weed), and flamenco singer Estrella Morente.
The conversation then turned to the film’s visual style. “They’re all hand-drawn, two-dimensional characters, so they have this nice handmade quality to them, but they’re good at using digital effects on the backgrounds,” Grunloh said. This “allows them to give the world a sense of depth that it wouldn’t have otherwise, and lets them do such interesting camera moves.”
“Apparently it’s an amazing tour-de-force for people who do know the technical stuff,” a participant said.
“There’s a lot of emotion in the characters, but they don’t do a lot of big, exaggerated motions like they do in other animation styles,” Grunloh said. “They don’t squash and stretch.” Instead, the character design does a lot with small gestures. “Rita’s just a couple lines in her face, but you can tell she’s too proud to show her heartbreak.”
Though in conveying emotions, one participant said, “a lot of it ended up relying on the music, and it really helped emphasize what was going on with the characters. It did an amazing job of capturing the emotional depth and complexity of what was going on.”
“I noticed that outside of the Cuban music we see, there’s also a soundtrack to the music that’s very much in the style of big Hollywood musicals.” Grunloh said the filmmakers had taken their cues from several old Hollywood movies; Chico and Rita effectively quotes Casablanca, An American in Paris, and On The Town, for starters. The filmmakers liked how the world in those movies was “a heightened reality.” Animation allowed them to partake of “the same over-the-top storylines that are told in a very stylized way, and it lets you get away with more suspension of disbelief.”
The participants then engaged in some spoiler-rich conversation about the motivations of a few different characters in the movie before settling on the main couple. “What do we think of the relationship between Chico and Rita? It’s definitely full of passion and poor communication,” Grunloh said.
“It’s a little soap-opera-esque,” one participant said.
“Very telenovela!” said another.
“They’re creative partners, and their art is super-intertwined with their attraction to each other. They have all these dumb problems,” Grunloh said “but their best work is when they work together.”
This returned them to the music, the beating heart of the movie, beginning with its role as the soundtrack for pre-revolution Havana, a place that was swiftly gaining a reputation as the Paris of the Caribbean and a playground for rich, White tourists. The film got plaudits for diving into the complexity beneath that surface — that the Afro-Cuban musicians who loved the music and relied on it as a source of income also felt the harsh discrimination of not being allowed through the front doors of some of the clubs they played, and not being allowed to stay in some of the hotels they provided entertainment for. The film also sketched out how the Cuban Revolution made the problem even more complicated, as straight-ahead American jazz fell out of favor; it was seen in revolutionary Cuba as imperialist music. Musicians were caught in the maw of history both times — a history that Bebo Valdez lived, as his music rose and fell in favor twice during his lifetime.
And Grunloh returned to one of the film’s most human moments, when Chico and Rita have a simple meal of frijoles in a apartment kitchen together. They talk about how they’ve always lived as artists, musicians, performers; they’ve never really lived as people who just enjoy a meal of beans together.
“It’s a glimpse of the life Chico and Rita missed out on — they never got to have a simple, domestic life with each other. They could have been so happy,” Grunloh said. Even if the movie suggests that they still had time.
“It was a fun movie! Thank you for picking it,” one participant said.
Chico and Rita is available for free through Kanopy with a library card. The next Animation Celebration happens on March 22, with a discussion of The Rabbi’s Cat. Check the library’s calendar for more details and listings of other virtual events it’s hosting.
