This contrast in images of Havana is available to filmgoers this week, with two very different movies that are both set in Cuba's capital. Actor Andy Garcia's The Lost City is a labor of love from a man who came from a family that quickly escaped from the new communist Cuba. Garcia's Havana is the prewar patrician paradise that suddenly finds itself under attack. Spanish director Benito Zambrano's Cuban Blues concentrates on the gritty city of the present, where a group of musicians, also aching to leave their hometown, try to find a way of selling their talents without selling their souls.

Both films are fueled by music: Garcia's with Latin-flavored big bands and lone, bluesy street trumpeters, Zambrano's with a startling variety of sounds from Cuban hip-hop to underground Havana death metal. Both films also deal with characters making fraught decisions on whether to leave the city for greener pastures. Other than that, the two films couldn't be more different.

Garcia's directorial debut, which was given a technically disastrous screening at Karlovy Vary this year, very much wants to be a Caribbean Doctor Zhivago. The focus, as in Pasternak's great novel, is on an upper-middle-class family's fluctuating fortunes in a time of revolution, but it lacks the depth of both the novel and David Lean's occasionally great film adaptation.

Garcia's screenplay is also laughably wooden, and it's difficult to believe that the late Cuban novelist, G. Cabrera Infante (a writer often compared to Joyce), was responsible for it. One can only howl when Fico (Garcia) tells his lover, Aurora (Inés Sastre), that the revolution is "bigger than both of us."

The Lost City is beautiful to look at when you are not forced to look upon Garcia. As Dorothy Parker once said summing up an author, "The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature." The same applies to the auteur Garcia. Not since Kenneth Branagh's heyday has a director so lovingly captured himself on celluloid. Garcia is in love, then in pain; he cries and sighs. The end, when it finally arrives after two and a half hours, is a masturbatory orgasm of personal memories and close-ups.

The rest of the cast runs from competent to adequate. Dustin Hoffman shuffles on as a nudnick Mafia boss, while Bill Murray does a very lifelike Bill Murray impression as a comic writer.

Havana Blues is more substantial, though it will not be accessible to non-Spanish and Czech speakers, which is unfortunate. Zambrano earned his degree in film studies in Havana and lived there for some time, and so knows the city's hidden alleys and secret clubs. His story follows two musician friends, Ruy (Alberto Joel García) and Tito (Roberto Sanmartín), as they try to get discovered by some Spanish music scouts combing Cuba for new talent.

It's astonishing that the Cuban officials allowed Zambrano so much freedom to film in the crumbling, neglected city. But Zambrano also exposes much affection for Havana, as great as Andy Garcia's. He knows the people, and populates his film with many wonderful Cuban actors. Certainly, García and Sanmartín are finds, as is Yailene Sierra, who plays Ruy's wife.

Still, it's the wealth of music being created in modern Havana that Zambrano captures that makes his film really worth seeking out, and no language barrier will stop viewers from enjoying that.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at