June 17–24, 1999

movie shorts

Buena Vista Social Club

recommended

Although his recent features haven’t exactly gone over gangbusters, Wim Wenders is in good form with this documentary/performance film. The film’s title comes from the album released by an ad hoc group of septuagenarian Cuban musicians who were coaxed into recording by American Ry Cooder. After the album became a worldwide smash, Cooder returned to Cuba to cut a solo record with singer Ibrahim Ferrer, and Wenders followed. With its swirling Steadicam shots, BVSC is hardly vérité, but Wenders captures Havana’s blinding sunlight and dusty air, and you feel them in the music as these old souls play. The interviews focus less on biographical detail than on a sense of origin, where these men come from figuratively, not literally. The performances, drawn from studio sessions as well as concerts in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall, are simply thrilling, so much so that you want more of them, and a sense of how each show evolved. By splitting itself between interview and performance, the film isn’t quite satisfyingly enough of either, but it’s still a moving and wonderfully shot document of a music and a way of life whose time has almost passed. (See Sam Adams’ interview with Ry Cooder.)

—Sam Adams