While his family fled to America in the wake of the revolution, Cuban intellectual Sergio has stayed behind-more due to passivity than political commitment. Unable to imagine himself a part of the new landscape, his days are spent killing time: gazing out his balcony telescope; taking lazy, aimless walks down neighborhood streets lined with both shady trees and his own clamorous memories; smoking in bed. All the while his head teems with thoughts of Cuba's cultural inferiority to Europe, self-pitying diatribes, and erotic reveries. Disgusted by his own diffidence, Sergio can't even see the irony when his scathing assessment of the teenage actress manqué he picks up on the street works equally well to describe himself. No less than the "underdeveloped" Erica, he has become alienated, filled with "the inability to relate to things, to accumulate experience, to develop. " Probably because his film's central figure is so inactive, director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea constructed his 1968 masterpiece out of a riot of influences and styles, throwing seemingly everything he could think of into the pot. There are minidocumentaries on the cruelties of Batista forces, stream-of-consciousness flashbacks and flash-forwards, delicate little photomontages, newspaper headlines, visits to Hemingway's home, even a philological debate attended by Sergio. The last does get a little tiresome; but other than the one misstep, Memories of Underdevelopment is such a vivid, consistently fresh and surprising film-intellectually and sensually vibrant from start to finish-that it's little wonder its belated foreign release single-handedly put Cuban cinema on the map. -Bruce Reid.