Wim and vigour

Published 09 August 1999

Film

In 1978 Martin Scorsese made The Last Waltz, a film about the farewell concert of the Band. In it, the group came across like ageless veterans who'd been trawling up and down life's highway since time began. In fact they'd been in the public eye for just over a decade. But then rock has a remarkably short memory compared with other musical forms. With Wim Wenders' new film, Buena Vista Social Club, things go back a bit further. The oldest musician is over 90 and wrote his first song in 1922. Overall The Last Waltz is probably the closest comparison to Buena Vista Social Club, in that there aren't many instances where major film-makers drop their usual auteur preoccupations and stand back admiringly while the musicians bask in the documentary limelight. Wenders' film is the result of a singularly bizarre musical phenomenon: somehow a group of aged Cuban musicians playing traditional acoustic music ended up making a million- selling, internationally acclaimed record. It's even stranger that Wenders, who has spent recent years agonising about "the crisis of the image", should be the one to film them.

In the field of music documentary, directors tend either to overegg the mixture with technology or to go for extreme functional simplicity, as Jonathan Demme did in his Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense. Wenders, however, is content simply to hang around, catch the highlights of recording sessions and concerts, throw in the odd interview or street scene and let a loose shape emerge. The one thing he does to give the film a distinctive signature is to shoot on digital cameras: Havana streets take on an odd pink-grey candy colour; vivid abstract impressionist images emerge from the distressed paint on cars.

The film was largely shot when Wenders' frequent collaborator Ry Cooder, who first recorded the Social Club in 1996, returned to Havana to produce a solo record for the singer, Ibrahim Ferrer. Cooder turns up with his guitar and his drummer son, Joachim, takes a back seat and watches approvingly as the veterans let rip. They gobble up the attention, as well they might - they're show-stoppingly charismatic. The pianist, Ruben Gonzalez, whose style Cooder describes as "a cross between Thelonious Monk and Felix the Cat", is a benign, white-haired gent of studious demeanour, with a beautifully tangential mathematician's touch. Ibrahim Ferrer is heard airing his light, lilting tones to spectacular effect on the haunting "Silencio" and seen proudly displaying his good-luck totem. His singing partner, Omara Portuondo, wanders down the street, trading verses with passing women. The most flamboyant of the lot is the guitarist, Compay Segundo, a more than dapper nonagenarian, who professes his undying passion for women and outsize cigars.

The film could have been cosily poignant - all these stately old geezers getting a belated stab at the big time, finding their lifetime's fulfilment on the stage of the Carnegie Hall. But the music is nothing like a living fossil - more like a coelacanth that's been unfrozen after decades and proves friskier than a fresh salmon. For many listeners, these songs evoke a past known only from Hollywood pastiches of the music: some of them could easily have been recorded in the 1950s, and you could imagine these musicians playing behind Lauren Bacall in a Howard Hawks adventure.

By all accounts, some younger Cuban musicians are more than sceptical and have even accused Cooder of being a CIA plant, determined to undermine the new salsa scene. Unfortunately the film doesn't do much to put the Social Club phenomenon in context. It doesn't tell us much about life in Cuba either today or before Castro and, although it doesn't indulge in postcard cliches, Wenders tends to go for the lightly amusing detail - the lugubrious dog on the corner, the old lady chomping a cigar that would have felled Lew Grade.

As for the musicians, we know they're hardy survivors, many of whom have been out of action for years. But we have only hints of what they've been doing with themselves (in Ferrer's case, shining shoes for years) or how the revolution affected musicians' lives. (Elsewhere, Ferrer has said it did wonders for them, because they could play for Cubans instead of tourists; one wonders whether that's still the case.)

Hugely enjoyable as the film is, you rather miss the pushy, worried style Wenders displayed in other documentaries: here, it feels as if he's taking a sunshine leisure break. At one point we see a slogan on a wall reading, "Esta Revolucion es Eterna" - this revolution is eternal. You feel we're meant to take this as meaning: the music is the revolution, man. But from the viewpoint of our own youth-fixated culture, there is something rather subversive about these venerables, looking fragile but feisty as they blaze away at their variously louche and sultry repertoire. Put it this way, it's a damn sight livelier than Last of the Summer Wine.

"Buena Vista Social Club" will be screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 23 and 25 August; it is released on 24 September

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