Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

The title of Bruce Weber's loving 1988 Chet Baker documentary comes from one of its subject's songs, but it'd be a perfect moniker even if it didn't. Rescued from oblivion 20 years after its premiere--and 20 years after its headliner plummeted from an Amsterdam hotel window--Let's Get Lost does just that, delving into the legend of the beat-era jazz trumpeter/crooner and after-hours mood-master with no desire to ever resurface.

Thankfully the fawning is considerably tempered by Baker himself. When Weber coaxed the performer--who descended into drugs and obscurity in the 1960s--into letting him tag along for his latest comeback tour, he was in his late 50s but looked at least 30 years older. Close your eyes and that singing voice--high-pitched, almost androgynous and breathy beyond belief--sounds not too far removed from its 1950s heyday. Open them and collapse with shock: The one-time pretty boy with the perfectly smooth face has decayed into a wrinkly gargoyle, all thanks to a generation's worth of smack. Instead of an aging legend, he's closer to the homeless guy down the street.

It's this turn of events that makes Let's Get Lost stand out from most musical biopics--that, and its accompanying style. Rather than stick to the facts or placate to Baker-newbies, Weber goes for capturing his subject's feel, even if it's one of encroaching death and decay. Still merrily addicted during shooting, Baker is groggy, rambling and usually unresponsive, leaving most of the facts to be provided by ex-wives, ex-girlfriends and ex-bandmates, who react with a mix of respect and irritation at their brilliant but manipulative pal.

Lost gives in to its star, filming him in atmospheric, high-contrast black-and-white that either hides its decrepit subject in shadows or exacerbates the deep, deep lines covering his face. (Though its director is a high-paid fashion photographer, the seering camerawork is by Jeff Preiss.) And yet Weber's love is never blind. Soon after Baker tells the story of how his front teeth were broken in a fight in 1966, Weber lets torch singer Ruth Young swiftly debunk it, rightly understanding he's not to be trusted.

At the same time he knows (because it'd be impossible not to) that this is it for Chet Baker, jazz legend. And so, rather than a mere primer on one of the late-night brooder's most reliable agents, Let's Get Lost becomes its subject's moody, coal-black death song.

Caramel opens with rapturous, loving shots of the stuff, as it's deliberately poured, boiled in pans or traveled over by a camera in extreme close-up. Oh crap--this is one of those goddamn food movies, isn't it? Inexplicably, no. What's strictly a tasty, sticky confection to Westerners is used primarily for hair removal in the Middle East, meaning the quintet of suffering but passionate women in Nadine Labaki's slice-o'-life gather around not a kitchen or restaurant but an inner-city beauty salon.

The twist is that said parlor is located in a part of the globe where women wearing makeup and looking good is in itself a political statement--although its heroines reside in comparatively progressive Beirut, once known as the Paris of the Middle East. Filmed between wars, Caramel doubles as an accidentally forlorn time capsule of a period when the Lebanese city was inching its way back to its cosmopolitan glory and, after going to war with Israel, a utopian vision of what it could be again. (Labaki dedicates the film to "my Beirut.")

All this, by the way, is important to know, because otherwise Caramel may come off like Queen Latifah's Beauty Shop, only with subtitles and a few more human-rights violations. The writer/director herself plays a single thirtysomething dating a married man yet pursued by a traffic cop so sweet he swings by the shop for a showstopping makeover. The rest of the employees at the film's cozy but partly dilapidated salon include a woman with wedding jitters, a closet lesbian, an actress fretting over middle age and an elderly woman torn between taking care of her crazy sister and reciprocating the courtship of a dapper gentleman.

Do these sound like the kinds of plot threads that usually set aflame the loins of fests like Cannes (where Caramel debuted)? Maybe not on the surface, but context and detail are everything, and Caramel is specific and perceptive enough that its mere setting enriches its storylines.

Filming tripodless and in warm, sensual hues, Labaki fills the film with particulars: the salon's unreliable generator, periodically extinguishing the lights; Christians and Muslims (and lesbians) living in unremarked-upon harmony; three of its leads whispering in a taxi so the cabbie won't hear them gabbing so openly.

Labaki needs to learn how to dream up storylines that don't exist solely to buttress her sharp cultural observations, but there are worse problems to have.

Not Reviewed

Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
The twin towers of pop. (Opens Fri., Feb. 1.)

Honeydripper
John Sayles' fable about the birth of rock 'n' roll in the Jim Crow South. (Opens Fri., Feb. 1.)

Over Her Dead Body
Eva Longoria Parker plays a dead woman who tries to break up her former fiance's (Paul Rudd) relationship with a new girl (Lake Bell). (Opens Fri., Feb. 1.)

Strange Wilderness
A struggling nature show tries to save itself by finding Bigfoot. (Opens Fri., Feb. 1.)

Ongoing