Buried alive A couple of accidents without further words were hung by a double murder on the boy Reynaldito, who had said goodbye to his adolescence and entered his youth behind a high fence and locked doors, spending years among feral cellmates and brutal educators, fighting back from raids and brushing off encroachments, until, thinking that enough was enough, he found a breach and, breaking free, went to look for his island of freedom in the slums of Havana, at least someone else could remember him.
The forced prologue creates an idea of the traces of early orphanhood, the inclinations of the main character and his loneliness, through the connection of circumstances explaining both his need for a family and a weak idea of a marriage union, leading the vagrant to a puppy delight from a meeting with the seductive Magda, hooked on the eternally standing stake of Reynaldito, enjoying the position of the content of a dissolute grandmother, ready with strangers for the cheapest sex, and behind the door lives a transvestite Eunice, calling himself Unisledi, who depicts a guy and a poor couple in a relationship with a poor partner in a future.
It would seem: there is a country, there is a city, but Villaronga leaves Havana scenery of personal relationships, conflicts and disputes within the romantic triangle, addressing the contrasts of male and female choice caused by different views on the common union for two, revealing the incompatibility of one and the impossibility of the other, turning into a real natural disaster for them.
And Havana surrounds people with a box of gray walls, clutching the throat of dark alleys, reluctantly revealing the canopy of day secrets and night secrets of its inhabitants, obeying the requirements of club regulations and strict legal norms, bringing a special routine to their not easy life, worth no more than a God-given body, some requiring more life, and others – warmth from the soul.
The dream of the self-proclaimed King of Havana is desperate and hopeless, like the feeling of a transvestite in love with him, which has become one of the sides of irresponsibility, as it should, taking a catastrophic turn, indicated by the approaching sea hurricane - a natural cataclysm used by the director along with his favorite fantasy, occultism and hoax, acting as stimulants of the madness and madness of people struggling with the despair of the doomed.
Villaronga this time used an unconventional combination of quite traditionally motivated actors, impressively represented on the screen, albeit by young, not so inexperienced, but very demanding actors who equally well cope with erotic storms and emotional storms, precisely knowing the measure of explosive effect and endurance, which is especially important for the character of the “King”, in whom Maykol David Tortolo found himself, although the performer of the more expressive role of Magda Yordanka Ariosa, despite being the third Hectorna, with less than the humiliation of values and sacrifice in the localized history, which he did not represent the image of the least poverty and poverty of his own words.
