Wim Wenders points his camera at a dozen elderly Cuban musicians and mostly lets them play. The music and the faces are the film; the circling camera and the restless cutting get in the way more than they should.
Wim Wenders went to Havana with a camera and a guitarist. Two years earlier Ry Cooder had recorded an album in the city with a group of Cuban musicians, most of them old and long out of work, and the record had sold in numbers nobody planned for. In 1998 Cooder went back, with his son Joachim Cooder on drums, to record a solo album for the singer Ibrahim Ferrer, and Wenders went with him. The film is what he brought home: sessions in a Havana studio, the musicians at home and in the street, and two concerts, in Amsterdam and at Carnegie Hall in New York. It is a good film about marvellous music, and where it falls short it falls short by fidgeting.
The musicians carry it, and Wenders knows enough to sit them in a chair and let them talk. Compay Segundo is ninety, smokes a cigar the size of a rolling pin and would like a sixth child. Ferrer was shining shoes when Cooder found him and says so without bitterness. Rubén González, the pianist, had not owned a piano for years; Wenders films him playing in a hall where children practise gymnastics around his stool. Omara Portuondo walks a Havana street singing and the women at their doors sing the chorus back at her. Eliades Ochoa wears his cowboy hat indoors.
We were moved more than we expected to be, and by a small thing. At Carnegie Hall, Ferrer and Portuondo sing Silencio together, and part way through she begins to cry. He reaches across, wipes her cheek with his fingers, and neither of them drops the line. The camera, for once, stays where it is. Wenders had the sense not to cut away.
He does not always have that sense. Three cinematographers are credited, Robby Müller, Lisa Rinzler and Jörg Widmer, and the film was shot on video, which in 1998 meant colours that bloom and edges that smear. Havana suits the look: sea-green paint, rust, salt on the seafront wall, an old Chevrolet that has been repainted more often than it has been serviced. In the studio, though, the camera will not keep still. It circles the players on a steadicam, a lap and then another lap, as if afraid that a man of ninety singing might be dull to look at. Standing still would have done.
Brian Johnson’s editing has the same nerves. A song starts, a verse goes by, and we are out on the Malecón or in a taxi or listening to someone explain what we were just hearing. Few numbers play through from start to finish. Jerry Boys is credited with the music, and the sound is the best thing about the production: warm, close and clean, so that you can hear the pick on Ochoa’s strings and González’s pedal work. When Wenders trusts a song to run, as he does with Chan Chan near the start, the film is exactly what it should be.
Cooder is on screen more than a man this modest would want. He plays slide, he rides around Havana in a motorcycle sidecar, he tells us what the musicians mean. He is the reason the album exists, but whenever he explains the players we would rather they were speaking. Wenders keeps politics out. The ruin of Havana is in every frame and discussed in none, and some critics have called that a dodge. We think it is a choice, and mostly an honest one: the scene of the old men in New York, peering at a shop window full of Statue of Liberty ornaments, says more about where they have been than any speech would.
Set against Wenders’ own films this is a strange case. The director of Paris, Texas (1984), which Cooder scored and Müller shot, and Wings of Desire (1987) was once the most patient man in European cinema; he could hold on a face until you knew it. Here he cannot leave one alone for a chorus. You will be humming for a week regardless. Watch it with the sound up and forgive the pictures when they wander. It is 105 minutes and there is not a dull song in it.
