Among its many, mild titillations, El Cantante's most pleasurable might just be its glimpses of Jennifer Lopez as the Queen Bitch many of us like to imagine her as being. These moments, however fleeting, make for some lip-smackingly guilty pleasures, offering up J Lo's character as a cross between Evita Peron, Tokyo Rose, Courtney Love and, well, Jennifer Lopez.
Lopez doesn't quite go for the throat as Puchi Lavoe, longtime mistress and eventual wife to legendary salsa singer Hector Lavoe, but you can occasionally see those chiseled nostrils flaring at the sweet smell of blood. Hector (Lopez's off-screen husband, Marc Anthony) is the nominal star of this music biopic, but behind every dysfunctional, drug-gobbling man is a dysfunctional, drug-gobbling woman, and Puchi functions not only as her superstar husband's wife and confidante, but also as his mother, whore, nurse, supplier, nemesis and boss.
"I love you," says a high-as-a-kite Hector to Puchi in the very first scene, having just been shaved, dressed and given a boost of coke by his take-charge wife, who dutifully peels a layer of fog from hubby's heroin stupor in order to whip the singer into a semi-functional state for the big show he's about to perform. "You always love me when you're high," sneers Puchi.
"Yeah, but I'm always high," Hector smiles back.
Structured much like one of those VH-1 retro-pop featurettes, El Cantante begins with its subject's peak moment of creativity and/or popularity, then flashes back, as these things must, to his humble beginnings. After the aforementioned sequence of a flamboyantly stoned Lavoe performing before a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden in 1985, the movie briefly transports us back to Puerto Rico a few decades earlier, where a young, dirt-poor Hector dreams of moving to New York in pursuit of stardom. A scene or two later he's playing the New York club circuit, then getting noticed, then being groomed for success by savvy record producers who see the singer's potential as the voice of salsa, a steamy fusion of jazz, merengue and other Latin styles.
Lavoe's inevitable slide begins almost before his rise has kicked into gear, and El Cantante depicts Hector's abrupt immersion into drugs without much fanfare or even context, as one long, largely unexplained blur of bad behavior. The movie flits back and forth through the years, alternating scenes of shooting up and (thankfully) music, with too few of the really high highs and low lows that comprise a story arc and give a film its shape. A more cynical observer might conclude that director Leon Ichaso simply couldn't be bothered to fine tune the dynamics of this material, almost as if he were on some sort of contact high himself from all that smack Lavoe is constantly pumping into his veins.
The music, at least, is plentiful and plenty hot, and Anthony — a wiry little performer with a big, honeyed voice — is surprisingly effective covering Lavoe's signature songs. Lopez, meanwhile, mostly stands on the sidelines, shaking her famous rump from time to time and, to the movie's enormous benefit, occasionally revealing her claws.
Viewers frustrated by Hector Lavoe's transformation from third-world nobody to American Idol in El Cantante — a passage that seems to take place in the blink of an eye and largely off-screen — might be better served by Journey From the Fall, another movie opening this week in which huddled masses yearn for an American dream of their own. Nobody in Journey From the Fall sings for their supper half as sweetly as Lavoe does, but the crossing depicted in this film is entirely in your face, giving voice to a story rarely considered by those of us who haven't lived it firsthand.
The travelers making their way through Journey From the Fall are a South Vietnamese family thrown into freefall in 1975 when the Americans pack up stakes and the Communists begin their ruthless post-war housecleaning. Long (Long Nguyen), the patriarch of the clan, fought on the wrong side of the war and winds up being shuttled between a series of "re-education centers" — concentration camps by any other name, where the interned are routinely brutalized by ideological thugs who quote French philosophers one moment and pound the crap out of them the next.
The first hour of Journey From the Fall focuses mostly on Long's hellish experiences under his Communist handlers, an ordeal intercut with scenes of Long's wife, mother and son (Diem Lien, Kieu Chinh and Tri Nguyen) joining a boatload of refugees on a perilous voyage to freedom in America. Long endures all manner of physical abuse and humiliation while his family suffers everything from shipboard diseases to bloodthirsty pirates, and it's not until these criss-crossing narratives are nearly over that we realize they're not occurring simultaneously. There's a reason for delaying the news that the parallel stories are slightly out of synch (I won't spoil the surprise), but it's handled in a way that still makes for somewhat clumsy and even confusing storytelling.
Beyond these parallel story lines, the second half of Journey From the Fall — although utterly different from the first half — serves as a mirror image to the film's earlier sections. The look and tone of the movie transform noticeably when the characters reach America, but the discrimination and pressures to assimilate that the family encounters in California become an eerie counterpoint to Long's experiences as a despised counter-revolutionary in postwar Vietnam. The key to success in Orange County is relatively simple, but no less painful than the blows dealt by Long's oppressors: "If you want to make a new life for yourself in America," says one of the family's newfound friends, "then you have to abandon all of your past."
Triple-threat writer/director/editor Ham Tran, a Saigon-born, UCLA-trained filmmaker, reportedly drew on his own experiences in crafting Journey From the Fall, and there's a palpable authenticity here that partially redeems many of the film's flaws, not the least of which is its tendency towards melodrama. But while the characters occasionally lapse into soap-opera speak and overheated political declarations (made even more problematic by a weepy musical score), there are also moments of undeniable power, particularly in the film's first half.
Tran even claims that one of his goals here was to create a sort of Vietnamese Schindler's List — and while that's mostly wishful thinking, how nice to see a story that actually needs to be told, materializing in a long, hot summer of eminently disposable blockbusters.
This article appears in Aug 1-7, 2007.