For a film that's so desperate to feel alive, El Cantante's director Leon Ichaso spends a lot of time flogging a dead body. We mean no disrespect to legendary Salsa singer Hector Lavoe, whose life is the inspiration for El Cantante and would surely have made a fascinating film subject for someone who actually appreciated Lavoe's gifts as an artist. Instead, El Cantante becomes Ichaso's second film (after Pinero, his portrait of poet and playwright Miguel Pinero) purporting to be a tribute to a Latin star but then spending the majority of the limp production lingering on its subject shooting up drugs. Certainly, it's not a sin to be honest, but El Cantante, like Pinero, doesn't deal with the depths of drug abuse so much as use it as a story crutch.
From the first moments of El Cantante, we understand that Lavoe is a force to be reckoned with. In a smart piece of casting in search of an actual character, Marc Anthony is able to employ his melodic voice and sneaky charm as the "choir boy–turned–Salsa superstar." Except there aren't any scenes that show exactly how that came to be. Instead, a mere title card pops up to tell the audience they're watching a legend and then expects them to accept for the next two hours that because Lavoe is talented, he must be more susceptible to drugs than most. Incidentally, Lavoe first sparks to the love of his life Puchi (played by Anthony's real-life wife Jennifer Lopez) over how to inhale a joint.
The two not only share a smoke, but an entire life together though, for whatever reason, red flags don't go up when Puchi finds Lavoe passed out in a hotel room filled with coke and hookers on the morning of their wedding. Their marriage should provide the backbone to El Cantante, especially since Puchi shows up frequently throughout the film in contemporary interview sequences to comment on their love. Yet Lopez and Anthony actually share less screen time than you would think and, with the extent of edits that Ichaso employs to give the film a faux vibrancy, there's almost no reason for them to appear in the same scene at all. Like Pinero,El Cantante careens through Lavoe's career with little explanation as to why his art was so seminal, hitting each of the highlights with the velocity and recklessness of a speed freak.
Sadly, El Cantante itself has no highlights. It's a biography that wants so much to be embraced by the people who lived it (an end coda actually lists Lavoe's real-life "supporting cast" and says, "this one's for you"). Yet Ichaso seems far too interested in what led to Lavoe's downfall rather than what made him great.
VIEW PHOTOS: 2006 Toronto Film Festival Cast Exclusives
