Vengo
"Without the Castanets but not 
without the blood lust"

By DAVE KEHR

Published: September 7, 2001

Source: The New York Times Movies

 

In "Vengo," the French writer and director Tony Gatlif celebrates the musical culture of Andalusia in southern Spain. In the city of Seville and its surrounding villages, a number of Mediterranean traditions — Berber, Gypsy, Jewish — have come together to create a mournful, ecstatic, improvised music that goes under the name flamenco.

The flamenco that Mr. Gatlif presents in "Vengo," which opens today at the Screening Room, doesn't have much to do with the touristy images that have come to us out of Hollywood films like "The Barefoot Contessa." There are no women dressed in long black dresses with roses clamped in their teeth, stomping on table tops and clicking castanets. Instead, the music is presented less as a performance than as a way of life. It's an attitude, mixed out of the hope and despair of the many refugee cultures that took root in southern Spain, which seems very close to the theory and practice of American blues.

"Vengo" is at its best as a concert film at those frequent moments when Mr. Gatlif steps out of his story line and allows some amazing performers, like the legendary flamenco singer La Caita, to cast their musical spells. The film's slender plot, which Mr. Gatlif conceived with his co- writer, David Trueba, functions mainly as an excuse to string together individual performances. The lives of the characters seem to consist of an endless round of wild, all- night parties, visits to clubs and bars with permanent open mike policies and impromptu sessions that spring up on roadsides and river banks.

Conveniently enough, Caco, Mr. Gatlif's central character, is a nightclub operator himself, the director of a suburban dive frequented by a suspiciously large number of young women wearing nothing but lingerie.

Caco, played by Antonio Casales — a flamenco dancer of international repute who, perversely, isn't allowed to dance here — is a battered, world- weary man, still reeling from the death of his young daughter, killed in a feud with a rival Gypsy clan. Caco is now devoted, almost obsessively, to the welfare of his nephew Diego (Orestes Villasan Rodríguez), a mentally handicapped young man whose father, also targeted by the enemy clan, has gone into hiding in Morocco. Now threats are being made against Diego, and Caco must formulate an appropriate response.

This standard revenge plot emerges as a major disappointment. Given Mr. Gatlif's intimate knowledge of the cultures he is dealing with — he is the son of a Gypsy mother and a Berber father, born in Algeria and raised in Marseille — he might have been able to come up with something more stimulating than the usual notion of a Romany ruled by blood lust. As fresh as his view of flamenco may be, his dramatic ideas are excruciatingly trite.

As Caco, Mr. Casales adopts a staggering, listless gait, as if he were being pulled blindly along toward his fate. He's too passive to generate much viewer sympathy, and with his long absences from the screen during the extended musical numbers he fades even farther into the background. He leaves the film without an emotional center or a strong point of view.

Perhaps Mr. Gatlif would have done better to abandon him entirely and return to the non-narrative form of what remains his best film, the 1993 "Latcho Drom."

A history of Gypsy music that took the form of a journey through time and space from ancient India to modern Europe, "Latcho Drom" evolved gracefully and compellingly and naturally, entertaining and informing as it sailed along from song to song. By contrast, "Vengo" seems held back by vestiges of an old-fashioned format that Mr. Gatlif has long since outgrown.

VENGO

Directed by Tony Gatlif; written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) by Mr. Gatlif with David Trueba; director of photography, Thierry Pouget; edited by Pauline Dairou; art directors, Denis Mercier and Brigitte Brassart; released by Cowboy Booking International.At the Screening Room, 54 Varick Street, at Laight Street, TriBeCa. Running time: 90 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Antonio Canales (Caco), Orestes Villasan Rodríguez (Diego), Antonio Pérez Dechent (Primo Alejandro), Bobote (Primo Antonio), Juan Luis Corrientes (Primo Tres), Fernando Guerrero Rebollo (Fernando Caravaca) and Francisco Chavero Rios (Francisco Caravaca)".

Watch the movie to celebrate the musical culture 

of Andalusia.