Salsa Self-Expression

El Cantante Directed by Leon Ichaso

“You may not like my kind, but he does!” is Jennifer Lopez’s defiant assertion as Puchi in El Cantante. She plays Nilda Georgina “Puchi” Roman, the wife of salsa singer Hector Lavoe (played by Marc Anthony). As Lopez’s most ethnically-defined screen characterization yet, Puchi’s street-tough impertinence about “my kind” gives this musical biopic a jolt of social realism. Not many biopics achieve such class reckoning—only Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and Sid & Nancy come to mind. Such extraordinary emotional authenticity grips the imagination more than director Leon Ichaso’s slapdash narrative.

In El Cantante, Puchi and Lavoe’s marriage reveals two young people coming to understand themselves. This personal story overwhelms the sensationalism of Lavoe’s hectic show business career. Lavoe’s renown during the salsa explosion of the 1970s, helps Lopez, Anthony and Ichaso focus on the development of modern Latino self-expression—the way in which private personalities connect to a large audience and, with Lavoe’s art joined to a musical tradition, contributed to defining the goals and feelings of the Afro-Caribbean community. Through Puchi’s impertinence, El Cantante immediately avoids the typical bio-pic slump into tragedy—you know, drugs, infidelity, bankruptcy. Puchi makes no apologies; she claims the excitement of ghetto-rough high-life as simply hers and Lavoe’s pattern. “Don’t tell me how to live my life! I’ll tell you what happened!” she reprimands her interviewer in the film’s B&W bracketing scenes.

El Cantante explores Latin New York’s music and drug scene with greater depth than in Carlito’s Way because it is always distinguished by Lopez and Anthony’s personal authenticity. While the film memorializes Lavoe, Lopez and Anthony’s performances make vivid and credible Latino characters that are usually movie stereotypes. When Puchi talks about the couple’s orgiastic excess, she says “I don’t know if it’s natural for others, natural for us.” Confessing risk is a harder truth than most biopics offer, and it’s said with a self-defensive candor that Lopez makes believable. She’s breathtakingly down-to-earth; her map-of-Puerto-Rico face has a beauty that is recognizable on the street, not an elevated fantasy figure—or the passing-for-Italian ruse she’s used in other movies. Puchi and Hector share a sense of bluff, ambition and good times that reflect the symbiosis of people who grew up with the same language, customs and social influences. Inside this celebrity biography is a fascinating story of two Latinos (“jibaros”) who carve a relationship out of both the deprivation and riches of ethnic urban life.

Lopez, Anthony and Ichaso seize the opportunity to make Hollywood’s first NuYorican epic. A spiritual connection between the island of Puerto Rico and the New York drug-inflected environment is sketched in Lavoe’s immigration and his destabilization (the subject of his songs). The family he forms with Puchi and musicians of the Fania record company, Willie Colon (John Ortiz), Johnny Pacheco (Nelson Vasquez), don’t simply represent a culture; they’re a lifeline that he desperately seeks. Ichasho and co-screenwriters David Darmstaedter and Todd Anthony Bello fail to enrich this insight: They overuse montage, a commercial shorthand. Only one scene—a cliché red-for-passion-temptation musical number—connects Lavoe’s art and religion.

When Puchi says her husband “had everything you need for a good man to break down,” she speaks for more than Lavoe; she characterizes the providence of an entire urban culture. Puchi implies a fate not told in West Side Story. There’s conscientiousness—even some soul—beneath El Cantante’s uneven glamor, especially in Anthony’s good, precise acting. He has a skinny, boney face like the young Sinatra but on stage as Lavoe, he sings with a marvelous open-throated pleasure that fulfills the idea of “El Cantante” as a people’s artist. But the film is propelled by Lopez’s fierce ally, Puchi; she speaks in a sharp squeal not so much reminiscent of Rosie Perez as evoking a street girl’s need to be heard. At last, Lopez has found a role that gives her caste meaningful style. These lines and these performances show a deep grasp of Lavoe’s environment. Had Ichaso put Lopez and Anthony’s simpatico into more coherent images, they’d have a superb movie.