May 2: Chico & Rita (2010 -- Tono Errando, Javier Marisca and Fernando Truebal)

★★★★

I like this movie more than a lot of people.  The biggest complaint I’ve heard is that the characters aren’t real and that you can’t feel or identify with them, and I think that's fair.  This is no Pixar production, and though there is a complex story and an arc for the two characters, the titular leads lack passion and verve.  Chico and Rita has a graphic novel quality and, though it lacks that genre's exaggerated angst, graphic novels rarely have engaging characters.

What works great here is atmosphere, and if you like Caribbean Latin, you’ll quickly recognize that quality and respond to it.  The early scenes of characters riding a motorcycle around post-WW II Havana evoke that time and feeling like a documentary.  Commercial signage adorns the broad boulevards of 18th and 19th century architecture.  In an interview, director Fernando Trueba said that he’d found an archive of street photos of the era, and he was right when he said they were of central importance to the film.  With Cuban Latin jazz as background, these scenes of Chico and his pal wheeling around the city with two female American tourists in hand set the context for the birth of the music.

Chico and Rita takes us into more depth about the birth of the music, and I found myself thinking of Buena Vista Social Club many times while watching the film.  There's a range of contexts for the music: local bodegas, ritzy nightclubs, outdoor markets, NY jazz bars, Hollywood movies and Parisian concert spaces.  The film—and, by extension, the music—starts with the blending of American and Cuban cultures in pre-revolutionary Cuba, but the film’s many settings emphasize the many cosmopolitan elements that feed into Latin jazz.  And throughout, whether in a swank or shabby setting, sensuality permeates.  Rita is sexy, and Chico feels it.  As the couple move from Havana to New York, Las Vegas and Paris, Chico and Rita portrays their sensuality as part of the music.  Latin Jazz is infused with passion, and the film nails that aspect of the music especially well.

There are many other joys in this film in addition to its reading of the music.  The animation itself is wonderful to watch.  Chico’s dream about America is a show-stopping piece of bravura work, and settings like the large, colonnade bar/restaurant have a strong feeling of reality.  It’s also fun to see familiar jazz artists like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong animated on the screen.  The attention to color, light, detail and point-of-view throughout make these visuals engaging as the music plays in the background, and the subject matter isn’t what we often see in film, much less in animation, with the visits to boarding houses, jazz cellars, and late night breakfast places.  Chico and Rita is a delight to watch, a graphic novel brought to the screen in motion.

It isn’t important that the characters here don’t touch the heart of the viewer because Chico and Rita isn’t about a pair of lovers.  With its graphic novel tone, it’s about Latin Jazz and the social moment the music grew out of.  And the film is hugely successful in portraying that.