One of the pleasures of having a local cinema is that you get to see films on the big screen you otherwise might not. I’m not a particular fan of Chico Barque, but it was a Monday night after football, there was nothing to eat in the house, so we moseyed out to Cinemateca in the middle of a rainstorm, enjoying the privilege of being able to take in a film without having to make any real effort. If I lived in London I wouldn’t have made it. It’s not the most extravagant of privileges, but let’s name it for what it is. The idea of privilege feels relevant to Chico Barque, a golden boy blessed with charm and looks who hit the big time at the age of 22, coming from a well-connected upper-middle class background. There’s not much regarding this in the film, but you can feel it behind the singer’s eyes, a sense of ‘how did I get to live such a charmed life?’ Of course, there’s no such thing as a charmed life, and his time in exile and participation in the struggle against the dictatorship becomes a key element in his story. The documentary functions on three levels. Firstly there’s an extended interview with the subject which is played out over the film’s near two hours. Then there are recurring versions of his songs, sung somewhat ironically in the Teatro Poiera, by celebrated Brazilian singers. All of this is broken up with archive footage. Then, towards the end, a sub-plot appears, perhaps, which is the remarkable story of Barque’s lost German brother. The camera crew follows him to Berlin for a fascinating if slightly tacked-on postscript where he discovers footage of the lost, now-dead brother. It feels as though there’s a whole other film here which the filmmakers have glimpsed, aware that it wasn’t going to fit into their film’s structure, but one with such an added poetic dimension that they felt the need to shoe-horn it in anyhow.
All of which is not to say that Chico: Artista Brasileiro isn’t a thoroughly competent and effective piece of documentary making. Above all for the way it recounts, perhaps even more than Barque’s musical genius, the history of a vast country and culture which exists, to a certain extent, at the margins. Barque himself relates a couple of self-effacing anecdotes about how little known he is in much of the world, in contrast to his iconic status in his homeland. The film offers an insight into the transformation of the country over the course of fifty years, from the post-war period to the fall of the dictatorship, revealing how much Barque’s art was formed and influenced by politics, in spite of the fact that by the end the singer says he’s seeking to retreat from engaging in any kind of political discourse. The film was initially released in 2015: it would be fascinating to know whether that position has changed now that politics have so rudely come back to haunt Brazil.
All of which is not to say that Chico: Artista Brasileiro isn’t a thoroughly competent and effective piece of documentary making. Above all for the way it recounts, perhaps even more than Barque’s musical genius, the history of a vast country and culture which exists, to a certain extent, at the margins. Barque himself relates a couple of self-effacing anecdotes about how little known he is in much of the world, in contrast to his iconic status in his homeland. The film offers an insight into the transformation of the country over the course of fifty years, from the post-war period to the fall of the dictatorship, revealing how much Barque’s art was formed and influenced by politics, in spite of the fact that by the end the singer says he’s seeking to retreat from engaging in any kind of political discourse. The film was initially released in 2015: it would be fascinating to know whether that position has changed now that politics have so rudely come back to haunt Brazil.
No comments:
Post a Comment