Fados

How many times can Carlos Saura make this movie? When he first used the brightly colored screens in Bodas de Sangre, thirty years ago, he discovered a clever alternative to storytelling, which he used to great effect in that weirdo, screamy lament. Later, in Flamenco and Tango. he pushed the expressionist device to its logical limit, altogether replacing, in the former, traditional narrative with shades and shadows of feeling, oblique tunes, fragments of sense; and deflecting, in the latter, plot from its own ambition to become closed. Like Ahab, punching through the pasteboard mask, Saura forged an entirely new genre that practically exploded every other effort to marry sounds and images. Using his gutsy new method, the Spaniard invented a means to tell stories by saying nothing. I'd never known such strange and marvelous tales.

What makes the technique fail in Fados? Simple. Whereas Saura evolved the device gradually from its surrealist origins in Peppermint Frappe and Cria Cuervos, with each new project decreating and deflecting its purpose, reverse engineering its equipment, inverting its vision, in Fados he makes a Portuguese facsimile of Flamenco. Nothing new appears, and as a result the film feels, to me, manufactured and remote.

Still, the performances are all equally engrossing, and a few are just devastating. And although nothing really happens--not even allegorically--it's not supposed to. Its lack of content paradoxically works to the film's advantage, foregrounding the song-style itself, as an art, which is, of course, the subject, instead of the singer or listener's emotional or aesthetic interest in it. This is, after all, as much an homage and an appreciator's archive as it is a standard documentary. I do feel, having watched it, that I catch the essence of the fados, and while another movie may have better educated me, Saura's experiment--er, reproduction--reveals Portuguese whore-songs from the inside: not as historical artifacts but as living energy. If Errol Morris draws his stories as circles and squares, Saura plots a different sort of graph, all parabola and ellipse.

Also, who the fuck else is going to make a movie about fados? You? B

Slothrop: What is a fados? And is Slothy better off not knowing, let alone watching a movie about them?

Koko: A fado is a 19th century Portuguese song of longing and lament. So the question isn't whether you're better off not knowing but are you wanting? And yes, you are.