Flamenco
If you love and have studied flamenco, director Carlos Saura (I, Don Giovanni) might have just made the perfect movie for you. If, on the other hand, you know nothing of flamenco and would like to learn more, consider looking elsewhere.
Flamenco, Flamenco offers very little support for newcomers to the form. No subtitles are provided for the lyrics; the only text comes from title cards that appear before each number, music video style.
Any notion that Flamenco, Flamenco is some kind of a documentary is just outright wrong. Flamenco, Flamenco is more akin to a finely produced taping of a stage show than an informative meditation on the flamenco genre. Ostensibly, the film charts the evolution of the form through its selection of performances, but I, as someone almost entirely unfamiliar with flamenco, could not appreciate such subtleties.
There’s a feeling throughout that one needs his or her phone open to Wikipedia to fully appreciate the images unfurling on the screen. The flamenco pieces curated by Saura are sometimes comprehensible and interesting without any context, but others simply don’t work within the confines of the film.
Yet, as frustrating as many stretches in the film are, I appreciated the rigor and the purity of the experience. Letting the dances and musical pieces speak for themselves demonstrates both artistic integrity and respect for the genre on the part of the filmmakers.
I am clearly not the ideal audience for the film, but fans of flamenco will almost certainly find something to love.
The great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Rigoletto a Mantova) captures the performances with sumptuous texture and minimalistic lighting. Saura’s decision to rely on painted backdrops for the flamenco performances occasionally makes for some arresting collisions of stage lighting and gorgeous artwork, though the backdrops feel arbitrarily chosen just as often.
The sound mixing, crucially, is solid. Though the film can’t quite capture the feeling of actually seeing a flamenco performance, the soundtrack does an admirable job of balancing singing with the guitar and the tapping of shoes onstage.
Additionally, the performances themselves are fine throughout. The dancing is both ably choreographed and performed, while the singing and guitar music range from good to possibly great.
Given such excellent technical execution, Flamenco, Flamenco is probably exactly the film Saura set out to make. I just couldn’t really make heads or tails of it. Maybe there’s a way to have made Flamenco, Flamenco broadly understandable without sacrificing the purity of the experience. Maybe not.
All I know is that while I could appreciate the film, I was kept at arm’s length for its entire runtime.
