I was kindly asked to lead a discussion of Malik Bendjelloul's debut film, Searching for Sugar Man, after a screening in Long Island. Since I'd not seen the film yet, I screened it two or three times in the past 48 hours. As interesting as the story of Sixto Rodriguez is, the film itself strikes me as both very labored and yet very haphazard, too. While I have no reason to debate that Rodriguez, a laborer who recorded two impressive albums in the seventies that sold nothing in the States but were very popular with a particular segment of the audience in South Africa, deserves all the praise he gets for his talent, his humility, and his values, I'm still left with the overall feeling that I'm being spoon-fed a tale that probably tells us more about a number of liberal white South Africans as it does about the musician whose records inspired them.
I suppose that's okay, since after all the film's title is "Searching for...": it's about the South Africans' efforts to find out what happened to Rodriguez. That doesn't make it any less overly done.
Since I'd read all the main news and reviews about the film last summer, I knew at least enough to know that when the South Africans were telling me they'd heard that Rodriguez had committed suicide on stage, that this was pure mythology. While it's set up as some kind of mystery, there is really none. (Contrast this setup with that of Chris Hunt's 1992 PBS documentary The Search for Robert Johnson, where John Hammond Jr goes into the Delta not to find the long-dead blues singer, but to try and find out where and how he lived and died. ) The filmmakers work very hard to convey that sense of mystery, as the two producers of Rodriguez's first LP describe a smoky bar on a misty evening and a man singing with his back to the audience (Johnson legend has it that when he made his famous recordings he faced away from those who recorded him). But it's mostly atmospheric.
The dark, slow-paced scenes of Detroit, a city well-ravaged by post-industrial society, make an interesting contrast with the brightness and the speed of the landscape shots of the various major South African locales. I myself felt the latter were extraneous, but one audience member made a very worthwhile point: that when Rodriguez finally comes to South Africa he brings his even temperament to that other geographic space. But the scenes do drag on a bit; we don't see Rodriguez until we are two-thirds in, and let's face it, whatever his talents, Sixto Rodriguez doesn't have the magenticism of Harry Lime, the villain of The Third Man, another film (this time fictional) about a mystery man who finally shows up late in the story.
The final part of the film is highly sentimental, and self-aware that this kind of story would be rejected by Hollywood because it's too fantastic to be believed. There's no doubt, however, that the South African audiences loved Rodriguez; there's also no doubt of the pride and love his three daughters have for him. (But we all wondered: what happened to their mother? Is she dead? Did they divorce? She is only mentioned once in the film, and that in terms of her ancestry.) It's very sweet that one of them would fall in love with a member of the crew hired to chaperone them on their first visit to South Africa and that now Rodriguez has a South African-born grandson. But there are still lots of questions.
First, one journalist seems to pay a lot of attention to finding the money: that is, in order to find out what happened to Rodriguez, whom he believed was dead, you had to find out where all the money from the South African record sales went. When he ulitmately tracks down Clarence Avant, former exec at Motown who founded Sussex Records, Rodriguez's label, Avant is emotional, both sad and angry: he claims that who got the money is irrelevant, but the filmmakers just drop the story, so we never really find out what happened. We just celebrate that Rodriguez is given a certified gold record when he does make it across the world.
Second, we have to take at their word the role of Rodriguez's music in helping to end apartheid, and I'm not so sure. Mark Aitken's review of the film suggests that those whites who were really involved in the struggle would never have heard of him, and no black South Africans had any of Rodriguez's albums. (When we see the concert near the end of the film, we see all the fans are white... the chairs, as he notes himself, are also all white!)
Throughout the film, we are presented with this mythic image of Rodriguez as this hard-working laborer, doing demolition and remodeling, carrying fridges on his back, but supposedly even doing some of this labor in fine clothing -- which I find almost as absurd as the stories of his suicide. One of his coworkers gives us the theme: work hard and you will find great joy in life. It's the ole Protestant Work Ethic. When the film makers ask one his daughters how the story of his successful trip to SA was received, her first answer is that in Detroit, people need a lot of uplifting stories. The city has been in decay for decades. (For more on that, you can see Curtis Hanson's excellent drama 8Mile, starring Eminem, or Michael Moore's first film about GM and its elusive CEO, Roger and Me.) But these conditions of poverty are there to be risen above, not to be resolved by wholesale changes. Okay, Rodriguez apparently ran for local office, including Mayor, during the 1980s, but his causes are vague and his plans not even mentioned. The challenging work of politics is set aside for the "simple" values of the working class hero.
Ultimately we know very little about Rodriguez by the end of the film. As one journalist says, perhaps that's as it should be. Well sure: it allows one the chance to read whatever he/she wants onto the man. And that's ultimately what this film is: it's about how a number of nice, well-meaning liberal white South Africans embraced a particular artist and projected onto him a sense that their lives had value and purpose. For Aitken, the film is an exercise in nostalgia. I can understand that view, though obviously I know nothing of what life was like in that country in that time. Whatever the truth of the claims of the journalists in the film or of reviewers like Aitken, it's clear that Rodriguez, for all his likely nobility, remains an image onto which his fans will see themselves.
In a sense, that's what's true of a lot of artists, especially pop artists. And what saves this film is the music: it's intense, sweet, gritty, and beautiful, although it would be nice if we could clearly delineate between some of Rodriguez's instrumental work and the score that Bendjoullal composed himself for the film. Ultimately, the records speak for themselves, which is a good thing, since the main himself seems very unwilling to say much about himself. For a similar film, you might want to check out Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club, about Cuban musicians who are "discovered" by Ry Cooder and who get to perform a similarly triumphant concert, in New York, for an adoring, well-meaning, liberal white audience. At least with Wenders' film, the personalities of these great musicians really come through.
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