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Descant on el Cantante
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony with director/screenwriter, Leon Ichaso, have tried to tell Hollywood viewers the story of Puerto-Nuyo-rican singer, Hector Lavoe and his long-loyal wife, Nilda Roman, “Puchi.” Their effort is a canned, rootless fiction, ripe for escapists, a disservice to Lavoe’s legacy. El Cantante is a bio churned into a pic of failed honesty and gooey romance as salsero romantico gone M.O.R., Marc, tries to emote Hector’s misfortunes and misdeeds and Jennifer tries to wrap Puchi’s suffering around her own self-image as a beauty and a Nuyorican gone big time. El Cantante fails from the outset because neither player can step away from who they are. Given that this is Hollywood and Jennifer’s dime--the out-of-the-gate entry of her production company, Picturehouse--it would have been an exercise in stupidity to have hoped for a bio-pic that focused on Hector for who he was and why he was loved. Why another ultimately insulting love story when Hector Lavoe rides the history of one of the greatest waves of immigration into New York City, embodying how it pulled so many hopeful people under as well as spawned some of the greatest music (Ken Burns’ notions to the contrary) to come out of this country and the beginnings of their legitimization and assimilation? One gets the impression over and over again of this movie that, rather than Hector’s story, it is about Jennifer and Marc looking for personal and cultural identity. Whether by design or destiny, both Anthony and Lopez have made it big in the Anglo world of entertainment. They’ve got goods—a combination of talent, looks, ambition and palatability with mainstream sensibilities. They’re gen-x Ricans, cut from a whole different cloth than Lavoe and his generation of street survivors. Hector Lavoe never could have sprung from the grit of el barrio to the tinsel of Hollywood, and Lopez and Anthony, et al just don’t seem to get it. When el cantante de los cantantes sings, “Mi Gente” (my people), he means it, feels it, lives it. Lavoe’s story begs for social context, but el Cantante lives in a bubble. Ambiguities and misrepresentations abound for the sake of plumping the plot and perpetuating myths. Lavoe is seen as the starry-eyed “Livin for the City” 17 year-old jibaro corrupted on arrival by the metropolis, but he was known back on the island to have dropped out of secondary and music school and to already have been lured to the seamier side of Ponce, his birthplace. His mother’s untimely death apparently left lasting scars on her young son, but this and others of a host of personal tragedies to befall him (save the confused retelling of his son’s death in a shooting accident), is not even footnoted by the film which prefers to reduce Hector’s pain to his remorse after skirmishes with the aggrieved Puchi over his heroin addiction. The action which clocks Lavoe’s habitual lateness and no-shows for gigs culminates in a showdown with Lavoe’s longtime bandleader and producer, salsa great—and greatly shortchanged--Willie Colon, who, after being distilled into a rake who’d rather keep his hands on a woman’s breasts than on his trombone, announces he’s got to cut Hector loose. In truth, it was the ever-expanding Colon who was itchy to move on, seeking broader horizons. Colon continued to support Hector’s solo career by producing his new band which he basically just handed over to his buddy. (Colon had a hand in the music production of el Cantante, and I can’t help but think it was he who sprinkled in background cuts of contemporary rock and soul music, stuff he was assuredly groovin’ to even during salsa’s golden years of the 70’s.) J-Lo evidently had tight control over el Cantante’s content, too, and her husband’s freedom to fill out a characterization, another sacrifice to art and truth. In painting the picture of Hector el malo, we are treated ad infinitum to Hector nodding, Hector shooting up, Hector looking to score, Hector promising--and failing--to get clean. But while Lavoe was known to be an unrepentant womanizer, it’s Willie who plays the dog; Hector casts nary a glance, a grope, a come-on, nothing, towards a potential sexual conquest. There is a moment in el Cantante that could have been defining. Hector, in an attempt to kick, has gone to a santero and, on-stage, fiercely ritualistic flashbacks and hallucinations ignite the performance of his co-written, powerful tune, “Aguanile” with its allusion to Afro-Cuban ritual. The scene revisits most closely the raw perfection of Colon’s energy and the visuals are charged, radiating and pulsing in red and yellow. This is where you feel, at once, Lavoe’s intense, Hendrixian compulsion to travel through realms of consciousness, the inextricable oneness he must have felt between spirit, psychotropic and art. The filmmakers did not know what to do with Puchi’s own addiction, to cocaine. It’s alluded to infrequently, almost as an afterthought and, while we see her doing lines once or twice, her own habit informs in no way how she relates to her husband (can you just imagine how a cokehead and junkie would get on?), her son, her day-to-day. Typical of the script--brimming with banalities like, “I always hoped I would find someone like you,”--Ichaso and his co-writers give us one throwaway line that could have cued some relevance; it’s when Puchi says to Hector, “We haven’t been straight for twenty years.” I believe that some people enter a faustian contract when they come into this world. They are warned that there is great suffering awaiting them. They can bargain with the devil and have him squelch the pain in return for an undistinguished, quotidian life. Or, the devil can convince them to accept their pain, its potentially tragic consequences, in exchange for the granting of genius and the ability to touch (and be touched by) people deeply. Hector clearly made that deal. You hear it in every note he sings, an edgy, frightened, imperious lament that says, “Thank you devil/get off my back you son-of-a-bitch!!” Hector has that ability to parlay pain into great art as do others: John Coltrane, fadista Amalia Rodrigues, Vincent van Gogh. It’s what puts them way beyond other artists. And its absence is what keeps Marc Anthony from being a supreme, emotive vocalist, though, for sure, the man can sing. But it’s also why Anthony can’t make Hector Lavoe real (to be honest, precious few could), and why he and Jennifer seem so much more comfortable as Hector and Puchi in their duplex overlooking Central Park then they do amongst the overflowing humanity of a (simulated) tenement apartment in the barrio. Instead of the hackneyed fictionalization of an improbable, till death do us part romance, I’d rather see the story of another love, this one assuredly eternal--the love between Hector Lavoe and his people. Note: But I’ve said enough. Following is an open letter, being circulated on the web, of Willie Colon’s disillusionment with the film. And, if you understand Spanish, YouTube’s got 6-part unglamorized bio of Hector Lavoe done a few years back.
Other Readings of Interest
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Carol
Amoruso has had several vocational callings over the years. She's
taught young children, run volunteer programs for seniors, had a
catering business, designed clothes. Ultimately, she found that
nothing engaged and challenged her the way writing has. She's
written every day since childhood, professionally since 1990. Her
involvement in the arts, society and politics of Africa, the
Caribbean, and the Latin World have been the most inspiring and her
work concentrates on those areas. She travels extensively but lives
in New York City.