Skewed salsa

>> El Cantante is a choppy biopic of Latin
music great Héctor Lavoe

by MARK SLUTSKY

Unless you’re a big fan of salsa music, that mélange of Latin styles popularized in the ’60s and ’70s by New York record label Fania, you’re probably not familiar with Héctor Lavoe, the Puerto Rican-born singer and star of the genre. Jennifer Lopez and hubby Marc Anthony, it would seem, would like to change all that. El Cantante, a starring vehicle for both, is a choppy biopic of Lavoe, who led a talented but particularly sad life of addiction, at least one suicide attempt and an eventual death in 1993, in his 40s, of AIDS complications.

Anthony plays Lavoe, who we see leaving Puerto Rico in the ’60s for New York. There he meets up with like-minded musicians like bandleader Willie Colón (John Ortiz), with whom he enjoys a fruitful and very successful collaboration, leading to all the excesses that contributed to his downfall. He also hooks up with “Puchi” (J. Lo), the woman who wins his heart, becomes his wife and basically narrates the film.

Director Leon Ichaso pulls out all the stops to make El Cantante work—it’s basically a collage of black and white and colour footage, concert scenes, voice-over, stock footage, and most of all, staged “present-day” interviews with J. Lo.

Yeah, about those interviews. Thing about El Cantante is you slowly realize this movie isn’t really about Lavoe at all, but about his not-very-interesting wife. You get the impression that Lopez is shoving Anthony off the screen in every scene, and it skews the movie bizarrely. The lengthy interviews are awkward and ring false. They feel like a desperate attempt to give some form to a movie with no clear storyline.

Maybe Lopez, so promising in early roles like Out of Sight, should just stop working with her significant others; you’d think she would have learned after Gigli. It’s not like Anthony is a bad performer; on the contrary, he brings a sweet, likeable vulnerability to the role, but the movie doesn’t exploit it enough. Both are undeniably talented performers who’ve made some pretty bad choices in their careers, which, come to think of it, should have made them perfect for a movie about the misspent talent that was Lavoe.

El Cantante opens this
Friday, Aug. 3

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