I
really enjoyed El último aplauso (2009 dir. German
Kral). It's
in Spanish
without subtitles,
but
subtitles
don't
matter so much
as
a lot of the film is music. It
looks great throughout.
Really
a pity I didn't come across it earlier.
Bar
El Chino in the Pompeya barrio
of Buenos Aires was
started by El Chino Garcia's father, an immigrant from Spain, as a
bar and grocery. El Chino grew
up
passionate about tango, and a singer, so under
his direction the
groceries disappeared, and the bar became known as a restaurant bar,
with music several nights a week. Kral began filming there in the
late 1990s. El Chino died in 2001, but his vivacious, gregarious,
open-hearted personality lives on in the early footage, included in
the film. The
first 25 minutes is the old footage from El Chino's day. Then it
jumps to 2003 with the visit of one of the singers, Cristina
De Los Angeles, to El Chino's grave in Chacarita. Recollections of El
Chino follow. In
the economic meltdown of 2001-2
the
property
owners
needed
to sell the bar, and the singers and musicians who had performed
regularly alongside El Chino no longer had a place there: we
see two of them busking in Calle Florida. Then Christina visits La
Ideal and meets the
young tango Orquesta Tipica Imperial. Rehearsals
of the orquesta with the four surviving singers follow, and the film
concludes with their performance together in the Bar
El Chino. Some
of the most memorable scenes for
me are
when the older performers meet up with the young musicians
of the orquesta
and
start rehearsing,
start
putting
their musical
experience
together.
It's
interesting:
singers
accustomed to
sing
with a
guitar suddenly have an
orquesta behind them – and they relish
it!
For
one last evening, people come to
the Bar El Chino to eat
and drink and enjoy the music.
It
seems that
the bar was later gutted and relaunched as a tango theme bar. How
is it that people can make such totally wrong decisions?
The
film shows
another side of tango. It's not the
tango
of
dance
halls and recording studios, the tango we hear at milongas, the
product of highly trained arrangers, band leaders and musicians, tango
controlled by the music industry.
This
is live
music
made by a
couple of performers for
an audience, tango sung to a guitar –
which
I think is how most tangos
began, as a guitar or piano score with lyrics. In
a
particularly
magical
scene, one of the singers sings with a guitar and violin while the
others clap the beat, and it's astonishing how tango
can suddenly sound
Andalucian, although
something similar could probably be found in Italian folk music, and
in non-European folk music too.
It's
like
seeing the folk roots of tango, but
the
songs are the same old favourites you hear in the milongas, Naranja
en Flor, Por
una cabeza, Cambalache, Ventarrón,
Malena,
Barrio de Tango, Romance de Barrio...
This
isn't
tango for dance halls, but
it's
tango at its most popular level
since
the music has always been more widely
popular
than the dance. When the dance lost popularity and the orquestas were
no longer financially viable, I assume people still sang these
songs, listened to them with a singer and guitar, whistled them in
the streets. The
dance, and to a lesser extent the music, has achieved world-wide
popularity, but what I
hear in this film is
the
basis of the music, outside the star system of singers and musicians.
Several
of the performers passed away during the decade or so of filming, and
subsequently. These were people who were around when the recordings
were still new,
when the
songs
we dance to were first heard, people
who
have sung them all their lives. It's
wonderful that this film gives us the opportunity to share their
enthusiasm and
experience.
It's
a remarkably
sympathetic and respectful presentation of this world, and
of tango. Much
credit and thanks to the
director, German Kral, who
was
born in Buenos
Aires
in
1968,
studied film in Germany and has worked both in Europe and Argentina:
his Tango Berlin (1997) was made with Wim Wenders.
The entire film is currently available on YouTube
but without subtitles. There
might
be a German version on DVD, and
it's really a pity it hasn't appeared on DVD with English subtitles.
It
would be great one day to watch
it with the
words of the songs in English for
those of us who aren't fluent in Spanish.
El
último aplauso is not to be confused with Bar El Chino (2003, dir.
Daniel Burek), which
also has footage from the bar and of El Chino and the other
performers, but sadly just as a background to a tedious story of
film-makers meeting, falling in and out of love, all
the while rushing
around trying
to complete a film about the bar against a background of the economic
crisis... Something
of
a self-parody, and
the
music hardly gets a look in. It's
also
on YouTube, and well worth avoiding.
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