Una Noche or: An Escape Story so True to Life, Its Actors Followed Suit (Film Analysis)

Una Noche (aka one night) extensively explores the lifestyle that resides within Habana Cuba, the harsh and unfair difficulties such life presents to its locals, and the people that try to escape.  

The film focuses on twin teenage siblings Lila (Anailín de la Rúa de la Torre) and Elio (Javier Nuñez Florián)—each with their own particular issues.  Lila is a fairly masculine girl—enjoying Taekwondo and acting very tomboyish.  These aspects, along with her dirty hair and unshaved armpits, make her a target for cruel mockery from the plastic girls.  Elio, on the other hand, is a closeted gay stuck in a very traditionally masculine land—witnessing his friends mercilessly insulting anyone openly homosexual.  At one point, Elio’s father yelled at him to “be a man”, causing Elio to push him into a wall.  The action made his father very happy, to the point of crying from seeing his son show such aggressive “manliness”.

The twins are born into a world where they would have most likely preferred to have been the other sibling.  Lila would love to be seen as one of the boys, rather than viewed by the boys lecherously as a piece of meat.  Elio would love to pursue the boys in a sexual and/or romantic manner, particularly his close friend and the apple of his eye—the very friend who actually has his eyes on Lila—Raul (Dariel Arrechaga).  Raul is a very handsome teenager with the worst issues out of all three.  He works at a fancy hotel, serving to the upper-class tourist while being treated like s*** by his management.  The locals live in a city that is designed for tourism and treats its own citizens like second-class.

There is an enforced system between the rich tourists and poor locals that forbids the latter from interacting with the former.  This is best showcased when a British vacationer asks Raul for a cigarette, yet the language barrier prevents Raul from understanding.  Despite not initiating the conversation, one of the hotel’s security guards immediately rushes towards Raul and scares him off—reporting the situation to his higher-ups, much to the oblivious tourist’s confusion.  Any interactions with tourists can end up having serious ramifications against the locals.  There’s a scene where a local is trying to sell cigarettes to tourists and is swiftly pulled into a back alley by an authority figure.  What happens to the man is disconcertingly unknown as it ends quick and ambiguous—though I fear that the best-case scenario would be the local is arrested.

Raul's father left for Miami long ago and never made contact again.  Did he die?  Did he make it there and leave his past behind?  Did he try to respond yet found it too difficult to contact?  It's left uncertain, yet Raul optimistically believes he’s made it big in America and is waiting for his son to come over.  Raul’s mother is a street prostitute for a living, having become ill after contracting HIV.  To help with his mother, Raul uses his own Playboy sex appeal to whore himself out for money and medicine, as well as pieces of equipment he's planning to use to escape Havana to Miami—where he can make it big and send money back to his mom.  Such are the dreams of a teenager oblivious to how difficult such a task will be.  Yet Raul’s far-fetched dreams are forced into action when he unintentionally surprises and causes a tourist to badly injure himself—putting himself immediately on the most wanted list by the cops and a guaranteed spot in prison regardless of how accidental it was.

Una Noche beautifully captures Havana's lifestyle, both the light and the dark side.  An elderly group are seen playing dominos on the street side and another group of locals sitting around watching a street performer perform an impressive interpretive dance just as Raul crosses the background—racing his ass off from the cops.  In one scene, Lila is cheered up by a jolly old man beautifully singing in the streets.  The happy little scene is somberly halted when Lila internally informs the audience about the man’s backstory—how Lila reminds him of his daughter who left years ago to Europe and has never seen nor contacted him since.  It's a sad reminder of how isolated the locals are from the rest of the world and how once someone leaves, they may never hear from them again.

The light and dark contrasts keep coming with a beautiful landscape shot of Havana that gives a wonderful view of the city as Raul, who is backed in a corner with little to no options left, silently contemplates suicide.  Yet Elio comes to Raul’s rescue, selling his bike to help buy the remaining parts for escaping.  Raul’s relationship with Elio is rather one-sided.  While he certainly sees Elio as a friend, his goal of getting to Miami has him treating Elio more like a tool.   What’s worse is Raul’s own toxic masculinity, as seen with his harsh interactions towards a transgender woman and how he casually uses f** as an insult towards others and (unknowing of his true sexuality) Elio—using the insult on the latter to push him to be more masculine.  

A meta-example of going against gender expectations is Dariel Arrechaga’s effective facial expressions with emoting Raul’s uncomfortableness when whoring himself out.  It’s a rarity for films to treat its male characters as not always being cool with sex, even with traditionally attractive women.  The irony is Raul’s blind to his own hypocrisy when he continuously hits on and excessively flirts with Lila to the point of making her feel uncomfortable.  He does, however, get quite defensive when Lila calls prostitution grotesque—unknowingly insulting both Raul and his mother.

With the final pieces obtained, Raul and Elio craft a raft with a motor on it and prepare to make their epic escape to the United States.  Yet their makeshift plan never had a chance of working—right from the start it is a disaster.  Lila ends up following the pair and tries sabotaging their raft—not wishing for her beloved brother to leave her—damaging the boat.  The group has to then make a quick ditch effort at giving the raft into the sea when patrol guards start heading their way at night, taking Lila along when she refuses to be separated from Elio.  The trio quickly find out to their horror that the motor does not work, forcing them to try paddling the over two-hundred-mile journey from Havana to Miami.  The boys idealistically discuss all the crazy stuff they will do once they are in the promised land, yet the far more practical and cynical-thinking Lila points out the disheartening facts: that none of them speak English, that they will probably end up as sweat workers in another low-paying kitchen, and if they get ill, they will receive no free medicine like in Cuba.

Yet being teenagers, the dire situation comes second to their libidos, with Raul’s mind being preoccupied on Lila and Elio’s mind preoccupied on Raul.  With this unorthodox love triangle trapped within a small confinement, antics begin as Raul continuously flirts with Lila, who in turn angrily rejects Raul and insults him, in turn getting Elio upset at Raul's advances towards the wrong sibling all the while eyeing down Raul's sweaty, glimmering muscles.  And then, in a moment that you know will end just swell, Elio tries kissing Raul...while stuck in the open sea with nowhere to go if it ends badly.  It goes badly.  Boy, if there was ever a moment where I wish I could lift a character out of a story just to get them away from the cringe-inducing tension, this would be a great contender for the top.

You know the saying “Well, at least it's not raining”, well it starts raining, with thunder and lightning included as if the very heavens themselves do not want the trio to succeed!  If comedy and tragedy are one and the same, here it has never been more apparent.  Murphy's Law is in full effect here.  Practically everything that could go wrong, does go wrong, and I can’t help but laugh at how ridiculously unlucky these kids have it.  And here's the real kicker—the part where you know that god is not on their side—Lila ends up getting her period, which drips into the water and draws in a f****** shark that bumps into their makeshift boat and knocks Lila into the water.  Raul jumps in after Lila, the force flipping the raft over—destroying it (naturally)—and sending Elio into the waters where he is killed by the shark.  Raul and a heartbroken Lila barely survive as they cling to a remaining piece of the raft—drifting throughout a terrifying, somber night right back to Miami where Raul is soon arrested, and Lila left without her beloved twin.

In the most remarkable example of how true-to-life Una Noche is, the actors who played the twins, Anailin de la Rua de la Torre and Javier Nunez Florian, ended up actually deflecting from Cuba to America while on tour to promote this very film.  The pair ended up disappearing while in Miami, leaving Raul’s actor Dariel Arrechada alone to finish up the Tribeca Festival and tour himself; “Well, at the very least, I will go back to Cuba…I have my family there, my friends, my girlfriend,”  Director Lucy Malloy understood the stars's wishes, yet was bummed out because she was already developing a sequel for the film that, obviously, would be much more difficult to make without its female star.  Nonetheless, it is a bit heartwarming to know that while the twins's characters never succeeded in making it to America, their actors at least did.