By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Coco
and Chavela
Coco
Disney-Pixar’s lavish embrace
of the Latino audience, Coco, is a package
rich in ambiguity. The movie’s ancestor is Walt Disney’s “south of the border” cartoons
for the Good Neighbor Policy during WWII (the effort that jinxed Orson Welles’s
Hollywood career with the doomed, Brazilian-Mexican project It’s All True). As soft as a creamy
burrito, Coco attempts to turn
Mexico’s morbidly festive Dia de Muertos
(Day of the Dead) into a Dis-Pix fiesta of flamboyantly Latin fun-for-families.
It’s about the boy Miguel (Coco
is secondary, but the imagineers wanted a cute title). The adorable muchacho loves ranchero music and is a
guitar wiz. But his matriarchal family was enraged when an ancestor left them behind
for a big career in Mexican music, films and moustache waxing. Banned from the town’s
music center (key line: “That plaza is
crawling with mariachis!”), Miguel goes up to the airy land of the dead to
find his grandfatherly hero, on the holiday when Mexican families honor their
forebears via candles, food, music and
skeleton art. The place is a bursting piñata of wildly vigorous after-lifers, plus
vapors of pathos. The dead, including Frida Kahlo (minus Diego Rivera), are
costumed skeletons held together by a kind of gossamer spirit gum.
Coco, abundantly
picturesque in its animation, may be the most patronizing movie of Mexicans
since Hollywood served up Tortilla Flat (1942), which starred those three fabulous
amigos Spencer Tracy, John Garfield and Akim Tamiroff. The movie needs more
songs in Spanish, and the famous ancestor’s top hit, “Remember Me,” is about as
Latin as “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” The festivities, though elegantly stylized,
seem less Catholic or indigenous than theme-parked. I found the bone-zoned dead
fairly amusing, but an adorable Hispanic girl of about 2, also present, started
crying about every 10 minutes, freaked by the loud sounds and blazing sights.
Parents, family fun is not entirely defined by Disney biz and Pixar pixels, and
family sanity is your department.
Chavela
The great French singer Yves
Montand was born in Italy, the great Argentine singer Carlos Gardel in France,
and the great Mexican singer Chavela Vargas in Costa Rica. She is saluted in Chavela, a moving documentary from
Catherine Gund (who interviewed Vargas in the ’90s) and co-director Daresha
Kyi. After her family scorned Chavela’s androgynous ways (“solitude became my
best companion”), she fled to Mexico as a young woman. A lesbian who liked to
wear pants and ponchos, with a severe haircut and a voice that had a
soul-baring blend of male and female qualities, she was called by a friend “the
most macha of the machos.” Her muse, however, was assuredly female.
As a disciple and then
drinking chum of the esteemed ranchero composer and star José Alfredo Martínez,
Chavela became a major voice and a devout alcoholic (tequila). She sang in cantinas,
vanguard cafes, private parties, her gay frankness not promoted but not really hidden,
either (she was denied major venues). A strong, fierce but loving figure, Chavela
made the most of the heartache in songs, with a voice of uncanny intimacy (she
was, of course, cheated by record companies). She was something of a cult
figure, and her lovers evidently included legends Frida Kahlo and Ava Gardner.
The one that mattered most was the cheerful, gringa-looking lawyer Elena Benarroch, herself a superb interview
subject.
Chavela fell into midlife
obscurity, but with Elena’s help stopped drinking and found larger glory.
Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, a huge fan, opened big doors for her in Spain and
France, and finally she sang at the top of her culture’s musical pyramid,
Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. Chavela
is a rich, true portrait of a most remarkable person, artist and pathfinder.
SALAD (A List)
12 Good American Movies Set in Mexico, though not all were filmed there (director, year): Hold Back the Dawn (Mitchell Leisen,
1941), Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John
Huston, 1948), The Big Steal (Don
Siegel, 1949), The Bullfighter and the
Lady (Budd Boetticher, 1951), Viva
Zapata! (Elia Kazan, 1952), The
Wonderful Country (Robert Parrish, 1959), The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1968), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Peckinpah, 1974), El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983), Under the Volcano (John Huston, 1984), Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles, himself no demure blush, had an acute sense of the vanities of other
director-showmen, like Cecil B. DeMille “who had a wonderful sense of his own
persona. As a director on the set he had the greatest act that’s ever been
seen, I suppose, except for the two ersatz vons.” Peter Bogdanovich: “Who?”
Orson: “Stroheim and Sternberg.” Peter: “Ersatz?” Orson: “Both of them took
their own patents on nobility (via ‘von’). You won’t find either in the Almanach de Gotha. Does that sound
snide? Really, I don’t mean it to be.” (From This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Bogdanovich.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
With
La Dolce Vita Marcello Mastroianni
and director Federico were fated to make film history, “and very quickly the
bond formed. Fellini ruled, yet not like autocrat Luchino Visconti, more like a
gambler happily heisting the casino. When Marcello showed up on set wrongly
attired, Federico simply grabbed a nearby jacket, tossed it to him and began
shooting. ‘He kept saying,’ Mastroianni enthused, ‘that we were moving along
like a couple of shipwrecked sailors on a raft, absolutely at the mercy of
where the wind pushed us.’ They heard the mermaids singing.” (From the
Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Burt
Lancaster waltzes with Claudia Cardinale at the grand closing ball in Il Gattopardo/ The Leopard (20th
Century Fox; director Luchino Visconti, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno).
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