VENGO Not Rated, 90 minutes WHEN, WHERE Opens today at Plan B
`Vengo' is a concert movie from which a vendetta plot keeps trying to break out. When it faces the music, it dances. When it wanders into plot, it gets hopelessly lost.
It's not that the plot is so complex. You've got two clans of Spanish gypsies who keep killing each other; and forgive and forget are not words that you'll find in your English-to-Gypsy dictionary. Caco (Antonio Canales) is the head of one clan, and the rival Caravaca family wants the blood of his brother for having killed one of theirs. The brother is hiding out in Algiers, so they're willing to settle for his son Diego (Orestes Villasan Rodriguez). It appears the Caravaca clan may have killed Caco's beloved daughter. She's dead, anyway, and Caco makes many grieving visits to her grave. Caco realizes the futility of this never-ending cycle of retribution, and wants to find a way to end it; but the Caravacas are implacably bent on revenge.
Caco's nephew Diego, on whom he dotes, has something that could be cerebral palsy. It causes him to lurch when he walks and contort his mouth when he talks, but he does not seem to be mentally handicapped – the things he says makes sense, and would fit perfectly well into the mouth of an ordinary sensitive young man. Rodriguez plays him with energy, but I never had any trouble believing that it was an actor putting on the trappings of affliction. Canales, who is a celebrated flamenco dancer in Spain, drags around as Caco with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and doesn't get to do a lick of dancing, which is like casting Elvis in a musical in a non-singing role. It can be done, but what's the point? Canales is an arresting-looking man, but you're more aware of what he's not doing than what he is, and you keep waiting for that flamenco boot to drop.
Aside from Caco and Diego, it's pretty hard to figure out who anybody is in this vast and wild assortment of darkly-dressed gypsy clansmen, and harder still to care. What we do care about is the music. Director Tony Gatlif ("Latcho Drom", "Gadjo Dilo") has enlisted the talents of some of the great contemporary flamenco artists: Tomatito, Sheikh Ahmad al Tuni, La Caita, Gritos de Guerra, and La Paquera de Jerez. If he doesn't have much of a feel for story, he does have a gut sense of what the music is about, and the alertness to step aside and let it rip. Sitting around in bars singing, breaking into dance on a flatbed truck, the musicians seem to live the music which springs spontaneously out of centuries of intense feeling – rage, laughter, passion, cruelty, anguish, love, and death. It's raw, it's transfixing, and it feels completely authentic, a music not shaped for the cabaret or the concert hall, but protected and preserved for the cathartic release of the people who make it. With his bona fides in the gypsy world, Gatlif has been able to persuade some of these reclusive and limelight-shunning artists to venture out into the glare of lights and camera, and has caught something remarkable on film.
The movie looks good. Gatlif and cinematographer Thierry Pouget set a handsome screen, with barren desert vistas of Andalusia, and dark, shadowy night clubs and back alleys of Seville. The uninspired storytelling and hackneyed plot don't really matter so much, except that they take up our time and tax our attention. The story came to him, Gatlif says, after a night of tossing and turning: `I slept little, and in the morning, everything was clear…I knew that vengeance was what the film was about.'
He's got a great handle on the music. Maybe next time, with a bit more sleep, he'll get the rest of it worked out.
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