The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés
(Spain, 95 min.)
Dir. Antón Álvarez
Programme: Artscapes (North American premiere)
Credit where credit is due: Antón Álvarez’s feature directorial debut is no run-of-the-mill music film. This isn’t one of those rags to riches to eventual downfall docs, full of talking heads (the shooting style, but sometimes even the band members with the same moniker), music clips, and other common meanderings. Yet while The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés strums a different tune, and its ambition is to be applauded, the result is more discordant and rhythmically disjointed than what one could hope for from such an experiment.
When not directing films about flamenco guitar players and their family secrets, Álvarez has a career as C. Tangana, his stage name as a hip hop artist of some renown and success. The film begins with Álvarez sitting in a booth, telling the story of meeting young virtuoso guitarist Cortés while the stars literally aligned. The fact that these celestial objects were, in fact, the newly launched Starlink satellite Internet system is beside the point – the fates had pointed to one musician needing to tell the tale of another.
Despite the fact that his regular job requires the deft use of rhythm to produce a pleasing flow, Álvarez’s film irritates more than it intrigues with its needlessly disjointed and arrhythmic structure. The result is something between a soap opera and an over-the-top music video, complete with maudlin settings, awkward interviews with Cortés and his surviving family members, and the occasional burst of genuinely entertaining guitar performances.
The film verges on becoming slightly more than a mere indulgence when it explores Cortés’ gitano roots, translated as the more common term “gypsy” in the subtitles (a word that some Romani people and others find offensive). The fiery nature of flamenco performances are so entwined within this Spanish subculture that it surely would benefit international audiences superficially familiar with the form to use Cortés’ music as a gateway into its nature, just as, say, the extraordinary Buena Vista Social Club introduced millions to the authentic sounds of son Cubano, bolero, guajira, and danzón.
Instead, and despite the film’s title, this portrait has relatively little to do with the art of playing the guitar, save for a select few performances recorded either outside in a courtyard or in carefully designed interior vignettes. We are told rather than taught about Cortés’ seemingly prodigious talent, his strumming and composition likely no different than any other flamenco-style performance that many audiences will be familiar. The dexterity is there, quite obviously, but for the uninitiated, it’s difficult to parse what sets him apart from similarly accomplished individuals.
All this leads instead to the core of the film: a general examination of Cortés’ challenging childhood and a family secret revealed after a tragic loss. I won’t spoil the secret, but it’s telegraphed so overtly that its grand reveal feels even more ridiculous when participants finally say out loud what’s been hinted at for much of the film. When finally said aloud, the story inspires irritation rather than surprise, the tedium of waiting to get to the point outweighs any impact from a supposedly grand revelation.
While the commonplace tropes of a music doc are dropped, the film instead borrows another batch of clichés from the run-of-the-mill “grand family secret” docs. The ineffectual teasing of these dark secrets is slightly more risible than intended, and rather than generating interest or empathy, simply proves frustrating.
There are other digressions that make the story less exciting for people hearing it than for the person telling it. Álvarez’s talk of the stars aligning is made manifest with shots of rockets going off—a few blips in the sky, and then…nothing. Even the film’s poster incorporates this iconography, even though fact it’s dropped in during the opening and never mentioned again. The point is clear enough with Álvarez sitting in a restaurant telling the story, so the visual cue after the fact illustrates a distrust of the audience.. And given Álvarez’s background as a musician and music video director, the musical performances often feel clumsy while the audio level drops in and out as the camera incessantly sways.
Moreover, while some scenes demonstrating the musician’s art with the flamenco guitar are enjoyable, , the rest of The Flamenco Guitar of Yerai Cortés is messy and meandering movie. Small glimpses into Romani traditions of music and dance are welcome, but they’re presented as asides, never fully integrated into the general telling that features far too much delving into Cortés’ traumas and fallibilities. As an excuse to wrap a doc around a series of music performances to highlight a particular recording, it may prove successful for some viewers, but for those wanting more than kitchen-table conversations interspersed with intermittently engaging performances , they are likely to share my disappointment with the film overall.
