It's Hero time

La Habenera is definitely a film of heroes. Read one way, there is the jealous husband who sees his wife as only a posession and the former lover, current hero of the day who wises only to be reunited with his past love and return to Sweden and fulfill his loves every desire and save the world somewhere along the way. Read it the other way, and you have a husband who does not understand how to make his wife happy, though it is clearly his only desire in life and provide for her every whim, creating the island paradise that she fell in love with in the first place. There to is the foreign doctor who will end up destroying the country's economy if he does not stop meddling and tear a loving father away from his family.

I think that in the end I side with Don Pedro as hero, though only slightly, for the villian is not Sven, but Astree. Don Pedro did not understand his wife, but sought to love her. He understood only business, and that the people of Puerto Rico could not afford bad press if they were to survive. He did not think that the fever was a good thing, but a necessary evil. It can be presumed that he had welcomed the Rockefeller doctors eight years before only for the entire thing to blow up in his face, and thus did not want to chance 20,000 of his people dying again in a preventable fashion.

Sven lacks real presents to be a hero. He cures disease, yes, but as a doctor he should. He does not fight off bad guys or solve a crime. Yes, he is a hero, but not in the bravery sense of the word. At no point was he in true danger (perhaps of falling victim to the fever himself?) but never like that of Don Pedro and the bull.

Astree is the villain here. She is tired of Sweden, so she escapes to the tropics, but perhaps only with the knowledge of male to save the day and take care of her. She never strikes out on her own. One could argue she worked on her own to return to Sweden, but that wasn't entirely true as she had her family waiting for her, and her position in high society that she had left. She put Sven in danger (or he allowed himself to be placed there) because of the same petty desires that lead to her entrapment in Puerto Rico. She only succeeds in her return because of Sven being there to pull her away. If La Habenera was really such a curse she would have never wanted to be there in the first place, nor sung it on purpose. She lacks any true motivation save her own boredom. I just wish to see when she wants to go on her next adventure. Perhaps to South Africa. They have snow there, and cuckoos (if only according to her song.)