The Last Supper

The Last Supper – An exercise in brutal irony, Tomas Guiterrez Alea’s The Last Supper (1976) is, at once, better and worse than a summary of its rather obvious and schematic plot suggests. In the early part of the 19th century, a Cuban landowner, decked out in a red jacket and powdered wig, resolves upon a bizarre Lenten exercise – he plans to re-enact some of the events of Christ’s passion with a cast drawn from the slaves laboring under harsh conditions at his sugar mill. The slave uprising in Santo Domingo has just occurred and the overseer, as well as the mill superintendent, are concerned about the rebellion spreading to Cuba. One slave, Sebastian, has escaped, been captured and dragged back for torture, and has had his ear amputated as punishment for his defiance. The landowner is afflicted with guilt – the local priest accuses him of “spending his time drinking with the slave women” – and he seems morbidly pious. He washes the feet of his disciples, twelve slaves chosen for “a ultima Cena”, while obviously disgusted at touching the black skin of these men. Since Sebastian is a rebel, the landowner casts him as Judas. The centerpiece of the film is the supper itself where wine flows freely, everyone gets drunk, and the landowner tries to implant Christian doctrine in the minds of his baffled slaves – they haven’t been treated with anything like Christian kindness and they misunderstand most of what the landowner tells them. This part of the film seems derived from a stage play and is static, repetitiously shot, and over-extended. Nonetheless, the debate between the drunk master and his slaves is compelling. The landowner’s argument that true happiness lies in humility seems to the slaves to be an admonition that they be happy when the despised overseer beats them. Ultimately, the landowner promises his workers that Good Friday will be a day of rest. But the sugar mill operates under a quota and, as soon as the hungover landowner returns to his manor house, the overseer rousts the slaves with his whip and orders them to work. But the slaves have taken to heart the eschatological message of the Gospels– if not the doctrine of non-violence – and they revolt. The overseer is butchered and one of the white women killed. The landowner raises a posse armed with dogs and shotguns and hunts down the slaves who played the roles of the disciples in the Last Supper, systematically murdering them. In the final scene on Easter Sunday, the landowner erects a cross to the memory of the overseer that he has identified with Christ (the slaves killed him at the same hour as “Our Savior” on Good Friday). The cross is surrounded by twelve lance-like stakes on which 11 severed heads are displayed. The camera zooms in to the 12th stake, a pointed stick without a head on it. This is where the film should have ended, suggesting effectively that Sebastian, the leader of the slave revolt has escaped and remains at large. Instead, Alea cuts to a montage showing Sebastian darting through the jungle, armed with a machete, intercut with imagery of waterfalls, white horses, and, even, huge rocks catapulting down cliffs (an obvious hommage to the boulders falling from the sky in Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia). This is overly explicit and kitsch. The film is effective in its portrait of the villainous but also well-meaning landowner – in a way, he is as indentured as the blacks that he rules; the overseer and the mill’s production quotas drive him just as the overseer’s whip drives the abused workers. The scenes of violence are shot like a spaghetti western which isn’t all bad – lots of zooms and dramatic Morricone-style music. There is a curiously unresolved and minimally developed subplot involving some kind of alchemical imagery – the mill superintendant is refining white sugar from black molasses and he inexplicably protects Sebastian from being discovered at one point. I don’t know what this is supposed to mean. The film effectively demonstrates that the meaning of the Gospels is simultaneously liberating while also profoundly repressive. Scripture requires rebellion while, at the same time, endorsing the violent power of Caesar, an irreconcilable paradox.