Day Of The Flowers (15)

Directed by John Roberts

5 Stars

Fed up with the onset of winter?

Then get along to Day Of The Flowers and enjoy a warm-hearted comedy drama with a socialist soul set in Cuba.

It's the first British film to be made in Cuba for 50 years and should prove a great boost for the tourist trade.

It's directed by John Roberts from a script by Eirenne Houston, who spent nine months on the island location finding and hiring local talent to ensure authenticity.

This included recruiting the international ballet star Carlos Acosta into making his film debut, his character exemplifying the ethos of Cuban culture.

It opens with symbols of solidarity in Scotland where political activist Rosa - the excellent Eva Birtwhistle - is ever ready to fight for every cause, while her selfish sister Ailie, brilliantly caricatured by Charity Wakefield, typifies an airhead fashionista.

When their stepmother (Phyllis Logan) decides to transfer their dead father's ashes to a golf monument, it provides the catalyst that sparks the action.

Rosa insists her father would prefer to be buried in Cuba on the Day Of The Flowers, when he met his future wife who died years earlier. Ailie, naturally, disagrees.

Yet she becomes an accomplice and turns up at the airport in her celebrity clobber, only to find Rosa is accompanied by kilted comrade Conway (Bryan Dick).

On arrival in Cuba the ashes are confiscated in a security check and they miss the tour bus. They accept help from Ernesto (Christopher Simpson) who fixes them up with a taxi that breaks down.

Rosa's socialist assumptions negate any thought that they're being conned but the more street-wise Ailie flags down an ecobus and they're welcomed by Tomas (Acosta).

The subsequent story symbolises the divisions between opportunists and idealists like Tomas, who's returned to teach the future generation.

Apart from great views of Havana and the island, there are contrasting images of decaying buildings and the hotels built for tourists when Cuba was faced with choice between diversify or die.

It's a conundrum that confounds some tourists, little understanding that they are problems dwarfed by the poverty in the rest of Latin America, where children compete with vultures to survive.

That contradiction is spelt out by the transformation of the two women, with Rosa realising that there's no such thing as "paradise," given the adverse effects of the US blockade, and Ailie increasingly maturing.

There's a lot to enjoy, not least burgeoning romance, and the realisation that even their own story is not as it seemed, a factor that unites them in a common cause.

No matter the differences in Cuba, there's a sense of a socialist solidarity as the experiment with a mixed economy continues while at the same time fighting the dirty tricks of Uncle Sam.

Cynics will carp but seasoned revolutionaries will appreciate that there is progress, just as the film-makers' experience has evidently left them with a sense of optimism.