52 Films by Women Vol 4. 24. YULI - THE CARLOS ACOSTA STORY (Director: Icíar Bollaín)
At the heart of the fact-based drama Yuli – The Carlos Acosta Story,
adapted from Acosta’s 2007 autobiography, ‘No Way Home’ by screenwriter Paul
Laverty and director Icíar Bollaín, there is an abusive father-son
relationship. Pedro Acosta (Santiago Alfonso), a black truck driver living in a
slum in Havana, Cuba, literally forces his young son Carlos, nicknamed Yuli
(Edilson Manuel Olbera Núñez) into ballet school. Ten year-old Yuli is a
talented street dancer who apes the moves of Michael Jackson with a few extra
side flips and who, at the start of the film (in 1983) is winning a street dance
battle. His father, seen calling his name in a frantic but to all intents and
purposes unmotivated search, grabs him and drags him home. Although in the film
permanently old, Pedro is powerfully built. Separated from his wife, María
(Yerlín Pérez) with whom he still shares a house, he teaches Yuli, with whom he
shares a room, that he is descended from Ogun the warrior. (‘I told him that,’
shouts Yuli’s mother.) Yuli is segregated from his two sisters who share a room
with mother – the girls giggle at him from a distance. His big (half) sister,
Berta (Andrea Doimeadíos) is white like Yuli’s mother. When Yuli’s (white) aunt
calls round in her big motor car on her way to a trip to the beach, she takes
only Berta. Berta’s skin colour might give her an advantage but in later life
she becomes withdrawn. We see her walking on top of a sea wall at the beach,
the spray from crashing waves almost hitting her.
Yuli’s relationship with his father is ambivalent. The man
is a brute and punishes his son with a belt. Pedro knows his son has a talent
(‘you got it from me,’ he boasts) and he wants him to put it to good use. Yuli
protests; he wants to be a footballer like Pele. He doesn’t want to wear tights
– he worries what the other boys would think of him. (Actually, he uses a word
that I won’t repeat here – slang for a homosexual.) He is taken to the school
and defies his father in front of the admissions board. One of the teachers,
Maestra Chery (Laura de la Uz) sees that he has potential – his flexibility,
touching toes and bending backwards, is impressive. The long bus journey to
school is discussed. ‘He can get up at five am with me,’ says Pedro. Yuli is
not convinced. His audition is a street dance – a far cry from the grace of
ballet.
In other countries, Yuli would have required a scholarship
to attend ballet school. Even then he would have to deal with racial prejudice.
In Cuba, even in 1983, free tuition was granted to those with aptitude. Arguably,
without Cuba’s cultivation of excellence, based on a socialist ethos, ballet
would not have had its first black Romeo in Kenneth MacMillan’s production. The
art form was transformed from being the preserve of those with white skin.
Yet we never see the moment when Yuli embraces ballet for
what it gives him – adoration not just from local school kids but from the
metropolitan masses. We don’t know what pushes him to excellence. It is not
enough to say that he had a good teacher and the opportunity to travel. There
is much that is withheld. However, this space is filled by the real Carlos
Acosta rehearsing his own autobiographical ballet, also entitled Yuli. In the
film’s opening scene, we see Carlos looking at a scrapbook in a rehearsal
space, his father (or rather his apparition) walking towards him. Later, in a
contemporary scene, Carlos explains that he does not think his father loved
him.
Yuli was not simply descended from Ogun the warrior, but
also from slaves. The Acosta family owned a plantation. Pedro takes Yuli to see
the fragments of a stone name-plate, a remnant lying on the ground. Yuli
imagines his grandfather as a runaway slave. He knows that Acosta is not a
family name but denotes property – property of the Acosta family. Yet he
doesn’t change it. These days, streets named after slave owners and others who
committed human rights abuses are changed; colonial names are discredited. Yet
Carlos, who has become a signifier of high art, doesn’t address this. When you
take a family name, you adhere to its values, not transcend it or re-write its
history.
Withholding information is Bollaín’s stylistic choice,
reflecting that Yuli does this himself. When Pedro is in jail, having been
convicted for the manslaughter of a motorcyclist whose bike hit the back of his
truck, Yuli visits him with his siblings and says that, far from missing
classes, he has made a spectacular turnaround. His father calls him over and
embraces. This is the news that he wanted. All his hardship will be worth it if
Yuli makes the best use of his talent. His two sisters chide him for his lies and
warn him that father will punish him when he learns the truth. In a jump cut,
Bollaín stages the film’s most powerful sequence, in which Acosta plays his own
father on stage, snapping a thick leather belt between his hands and chasing
another dancer (playing Yuli) before beating him. This is cross-cut with a
scene from Yuli’s childhood, in which Pedro (off-screen) is beating his son
while Yuli’s mother and siblings pound on a locked door begging him to stop.
Later, Pedro looks at the bruises he has inflicted whilst Yuli sleeps, and then
replaces the sheet. Does he experience shame or remorse? Bollaín does not make
a judgment.
The young Yuli is most alive when he flees ballet school,
chases and then is seen hanging off the side of a bus and then is shown
floating in water. He finds himself in an abandoned building, a honeycomb type
structure that was designed as an arts centre. How do we know this? Whilst Yuli
is there, a group wanders round and there is some helpful exposition. We learn
that the Soviet influence on Cuba’s cultural policy caused the structure to be
abandoned in 1965. Whilst he is alone in the building, Yuli stamps his feet and
listens to the unusual metallic echo – the sound design in this sequence is
striking. He holds up his palms to the sun that streams through a skylight far
above his head. Later, we see the twenty something year old Carlos (Keyvin
Martínez) take a young woman there.
In another leap, Bollaín takes us from Yuli’s childhood to
his family watching him on television in 1990, aged seventeen. He is competing
for a gold medal in Lausanne. The TV (typically) goes on the blink but once the
picture is restored, Pedro and his family share in his victory. Amazingly, the
quartet is still together. In an earlier scene, Yuli’s mother is told that her
mother is leaving Cuba with her sister. The woman can take María and Berta.
Yuli is incredulous. Would his mother leave behind two out of three of her
children, never to see them again? The alternative is that María would never
see her mother again – the Cuba authorities do not allow illegal émigrés to
return. There is a tearful farewell. The impact of this moment is never
discussed, though it may be a contributing factor to Berta’s depression. She is
the only one who does not celebrate Yuli’s success in Lausanne. She could have
had a life abroad too, but a decision was made over which she had no control.
The film charts Yuli’s success as a young dancer in broad
strokes, as he moves to London to join the English National Ballet, where he
does not speak the language. We don’t find out how he overcomes this or even
how he experiences life in London. He injures himself in a rehearsal space and
returns to Havana, where he is treated like a rich tourist – a child asks him
for money. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ Yuli asks. Back home, he has no desire to
return to ballet. His contemporaries want to flee the country, trusting their
escape to a life raft. Yuli tries to talk them out of it. We never find out
what happens to them. Yuli’s teacher visits him with an offer from Houston.
Will Yuli’s ankle allow him to take it up?
Some biographical dramas have cathartic moments. Not this
one. Pedro sees his son dance in London and toasts his success. At dinner, he
lists the things that gave Yuli success: his teacher, his talent. His speech
invites Yuli to show his appreciation for how his father pushed him. Yuli
smiles and says nothing.
Pedro Acosta died in 2012. We see his grave.
The intercutting of biographical drama with Carlos’ ballet
is seamless. There is a sequence involving the US general Smedley Darlington
Butler, the so-called maverick marine. Butler wrote a book, ‘War is a Racket’
and described himself as a gangster for capitalism. One of the dancers asks
Carlos ‘what has this got to do with your life story?’ It is another question
that isn’t answered, though the ballet itself is striking.
The ballet sequences don’t complete the missing narrative,
rather complement it. This is an impressionistic biography, not to be taken
entirely at face value. When we see Yuli as a young man walking through the
streets of London, it is (for us Londoners) the city of 2017 and not of the
early 2000s – the barriers on Waterloo Bridge erected to prevent motorists from
driving on the pavement to kill pedestrians in the wake of a terrorist incident
is a giveaway.
The other curious aspect of the film is that it doesn’t
appear to be the product of a national cinema. It neither reflects nor
critiques national boundaries. It is not realist but neither is it an uplifting
film (in the Hollywood mode) celebrating triumph over absurdity. It does not
privilege one nationality or even the craft of ballet as civilising. Ballet
emerged from Italy in the 15th and 16th Centuries in the
Italian renaissance courts and was taken up in France under the patronage of
Catherine de Medici. The ballet pointed shoe was developed by Charles Didelot
in 1795. This is to say that no one country can truly claim the form. Yuli was
trained in Havana but developed in England, where he is currently based. No one
country can claim him.
If the film isn’t cathartic, if it doesn’t tell us what
Carlos thinks about his dedication to his craft, if it is an incomplete
biography, then what does it achieve? It is a movie designed to make the
audience think than to make them feel. Some film directors like to start their
work with a question and end with a different question. I left Yuli
– The Carlos Acosta Story with the same question: what made him a great
dancer? Maybe we don’t know yet.
Reviewed at BFI South
Bank Screen Three, Waterloo, Central London, Thursday 4 April 2019, 20:25
screening. Preview courtesy of Modern Films
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