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EL CANTANTE
Directed by: Leon Ichaso.
Produced by: David Maldonado, Jennifer Lopez, Simon Fields & Julio Caro.
Written by: Ichaso, David Darmstaedter & Todd Anthony Bello.
Director of Photography: Claudio Chea.
Edited by: David Tedeschi & Raul Marchand.
Music: Andres Levin.
Released by: Picturehouse.
Language: English & Spanish with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: USA. 116 min. Rated R.
With: Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, John Ortiz & Manny Perez.

El Cantante is the Latin take on the all too familiar biopic of a natural talent rising to pop culture success only to be brought down by drugs. But Héctor Lavoe’s life story sadly lacks the redemptive trajectory of Walk the Line or Ray or any other insight.

Héctor Perez (played passively by Marc Anthony) leaves Puerto Rico as a teenager for the dance clubs of the Bronx and becomes Héctor Lavoe, the last name a play on the French word for the voice. His meteoric rise flashes by with images of album covers, concert flyers, news reports, and rave reviews for him as one of the “Bad Boys of Salsa.”

Issues of cultural tensions between Spanish-based, Caribbean-influenced Puerto Ricans vs. English-based, R & B, and jazz-influenced Nuyoricans are a running theme. But there is barely a one-sentence explanation of what was unique about Lavoe’s sound, even during recording sessions as the new Fania record label pairs the island singing style of Lavoe with the urban horns and rhythms of Willie Colon (John Ortiz), marketed as the Latin parallel to Motown (with hints of typical record company financial skullduggery).

Though the music is the film’s strongest element, there are few clues as to Lavoe’s innovations beyond his Puerto Rican nationalism that made him more than just a pop star. Anthony’s extended concert scenes are about the only clues to Lavoe’s emotions, particularly when lyrics with autobiographical resonance colorfully float across the screen, larger and with more emphasis than even the vampiric subtitles in Day Watch. His ever-present wife, Puchi (Jennifer Lopez), explains a couple of times that Latin men are too macho for therapy, so songs are the only outlet to deal with his many family tragedies.

With the same production team as Piñero, director/co-writer Leon Ichaso uses the same style of back and forth chronology (from 1963 to 2002). But the visual and musical stylings are much stronger here than the clunky dialogue. The fictionalized interviews with Lopez as Puchi are so defensive and self-aggrandizing: “He had it all. He had me.” The more she insists how funny Lavoe was, the less amusing he seems. Referring to their life of sex, drugs, and salsa, she shrugs “It was normal for us.”

Lopez (one of the producers) gets a lot of screen time to swear, snort coke, smoke pot, and wriggle her rump while alternately kissing and shrilly hectoring her husband in her native Bronx accent, but there’s little psychological depth to her role, even though she’s seen again and again dragging Lavoe out of sordid shooting galleries and drugged stupors in order to make a concert and even their wedding. Except for the interviews where she seems to be wearing kabuki make-up to indicate she’s older, Lopez hardly ages. Filmed like Marlene Dietrich in her Josef von Sternberg period, she seems just to be parading sexy costumes, wigs, and make-up that don’t indicate time changes via fashion as dramatically as Talk to Me, also set in the same decades.

The accompanying soundtrack album of “music from and inspired by the film,” unfortunately, only includes Anthony’s studio reinterpretations of Lavoe’s most famous songs and none by the other Fania Allstars that add so much atmosphere to the film, though the documentary, Yo soy, del son a la salsa, provides some context to the rise of Latin popular music. Nora Lee Mandel
August 3, 2007