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El Cantante
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In 2009, I watched an eager undergrad present a 20-minute paper on El Cantante. It was part of an international conference (held in Melbourne) titled B for Bad Cinema, and the speaker had an unshakeably literal understanding of the general topic. There was nothing to ‘problematise’ in the concept of badness, or our propensity to attribute it to this film or that; no, she set out simply to enumerate all the possible ways that a film could fail, that it could be awful. And El Cantante, the biopic of salsa singer Hector Lavoe (1946-1993), already bashed from pillar to post by critics over the preceding three years, served the purpose perfectly. Bad acting! Bad script! Bad camerawork and editing, MTV style! Translated song lyrics (from Spanish) wafting across the screen, how ridiculous! Plenty of real incidents and characters omitted for the sake of highlighting the eminent, glamorous showbiz couple of the time, the stars Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony! How bad can one film get?? When I thought again of El Cantante in 2023 – and this student’s verdict on it, which I politely but firmly disagreed with from the audience at the time – I discovered the sad fact that its Cuban-born director, Leon Ichaso, had died at age 74, just a few months earlier in May. This had not made much news. I have always followed Ichaso’s career – which moved between independent features and tele-films – with interest and enthusiasm, whenever a piece of it flashed by me. After a long struggle with cancer, which he had beaten, Ichaso suffered a heart attack and passed away. His last film, Paraiso, was in 2009. Like El Cantante, it was criticised for its handheld camerawork and rapid editing, and its escalation from realistic observation into melodrama. Same old, same old … In 2023 as in 2006, I find El Cantante a very striking, quite lively movie. From its opening sequence – in which Nilda or “Puchi” (Lopez) drags Hector (Anthony) out of some seedy drug den, and proceeds to bring him back to life in the back of a cab well enough (and fast enough) to shove him onto a waiting stage, where he performs flawlessly and charismatically – this biopic stakes its particular take on Lavoe’s life. In essence, it’s one big downer: he’s high, a total fuck-up, Puchi is both his saviour and his enabler, and – no matter what he does, no matter how rude or shambling he seems – his public just eats it up, worships him even more. The depths of his musical art are inseparable from the lifelong catalogue of pain that he so often sang about. And, since he and Puchi did more-or-less last out 20 years together, it’s also a weird, twisted kind of love-hate-love story. Ichaso (who was the main writer of the shooting script) and his collaborators stake the arc, the style and the intensity of their film on this paradox, which is a little unusual for a biopic: no salvation, no redemption, a catalogue of failures, hardly any good vibes, just the double-bind of an immortal cultural movement in music (salsa) tied to a collective lifestyle which Lopez proudly described, in an interview, as “dirty” (she comments that The Tragedy of Hector Lavoe would have been a good title). Only Ethan Hawke’s Blaze (2018), in a very different register, rides such a downbeat through-line in the musician biopic genre – a line closer to Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) than Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022). Much has indeed been removed from Lavoe’s life here – what’s new? – including a briefly glimpsed lover who also bore a child by him. Some events are strangely elided or merely alluded to, such as the death-by-accidental shooting of his and Puchi’s son, Tito, and Hector’s near-fatal suicide attempt – jumping from the high floor of a hotel in Puerto Rico after a spectacularly dismal comeback concert there. The not insignificant detail of Lavoe’s contraction of AIDS (through drug use) is made clearer in the final on-screen titles than during the narrative itself. And there are mysteries inherent in the material: it’s based on (or inspired by, at any rate) Puchi’s recorded interviews of 2002, and she (alongside David Maldonado, who had produced the late ‘90s stage presentation Who Killed Hector Lavoe?) got a first draft of the script to Lopez; but, by the time the film was made, there was surely no pressure to conform the telling of the story to Puchi’s particular, slanted version of it. But that was what Ichaso chose as the framework: Puchi in a recording studio in 2002 (and black-and-white), cueing the flashback roll-out. Subsequent to its release, many who had worked with Lavoe (including Willie Colón, here embodied by John Ortiz) took their distance from the film and its reputed “exploitation” of the material. (Unfavourable depiction of an ethnic/immigrant culture, all that.) And even Rúben Blades (composer of the ode to Lavoe, “El Cantante”) doesn’t play himself on screen! (Víctor Manuelle fills in, hiding under a severely tilted hat.) As cinema, it sure ain’t boring. The crowd scenes, whether on streets on in concert halls, are far better and more convincing than such spectacles usually look in music-career movies. The mocking-up of the performances (Lavoe and a usually large band), both physically and aurally, is terrific. The interplay of on-stage, off-stage and audience is vivid. Cinematographer Claudio Chea (1950-2022), who mainly worked on Spanish-language productions, excelled himself here. Ichaso committed his creative crew to a definite method: a little in the Tony Scott vein, a vigorous use of the zoom lens is married to frenetic editing (by Raúl Marchand Sánchez and David Tedeschi) – whether it’s an intimate dialogue scene or a group scrum. Colours are hyper-saturated, and everything is powered by the music and its transitions. I dig it. So, I enthusiastically recommend El Cantante, now and forever … as a good film! MORE Ichaso: Those Bedroom Eyes, The Fear Inside © Adrian Martin 31 August 2023 |
