Good music, bad movie

This documentary is based on a North American concert tour of the same name conducted in 1999 and 2001 involving five well-known groups of musicians, singers, and dancers of the Romani people hailing from four countries--India, Macedonia, Romania and Spain. Each group is distinctive. Esma Redžepova from Skopje, Macedonia, who leads off the performance, is a portly diva of great energy and a certain age whose commanding voice evokes Tibet, India, and Flamenco. Called "the queen of the gypsies," she's noted as a humanitarian fundraiser and brought up dozens of orphans whom she turned into musicians. Antonio El Pipa, from Jerez de la Frontera in Spain, is a Flamenco dander who performes with his aunt Juana, whose near-bass voice has the authentic raspy deep-throated wail to it, and when she sings of having found God after her son and husband were relieved of their drug addiction, it still sounds like classic Flamenco. Taraf de Haidouks ("band of outlaws") from the village of Clejani, Romania, headed by the elderly Nicolai Neaucescu, a tireless, toothless, chain-smoking busker, is more the kind of group one may associate with "gypsy" music--lots of wailing strings and wailing men in shabby suits and rumpled hats. Rather similar is Fanfare Ciocarlia, a 12-piece brass band from Zece Prajini, another Romanian village near the Moldavian border. Their music blends Middle Eastern, Turkish, and Slavic elements and has klezmer overtones. Odder is Maharaja (AKA Musafir) from Rajisthan, India, three fine musicians in gorgeous attire playing in a folkloric style that suggests Indian and Arabic music to accompany a cross-dressing self-taught Sufi-style dancer, Sayari Sapera, who spins around on his knees: better camera work would have shown the details of this feat; but camera work is one of several areas in which this film does not excel.

Gypsy Caravan--why was the tour so titled when "gypsy" is a pejorative term for the Roma people based on a false derivation from Egypt?--is a film that does too much with other things and not enough with the music. It is interesting, though not entirely surprising, that the groups spoke a lot of different languages but felt a common bond; it's slightly embarrassing fun to see the Indians do a take-off on Flamenco; and all the groups, after bonding on the bus and during down times, somehow team up and blend for a finale toward the end of the tour. As shown in films constantly spliced in, showing the performers in their various home countries, each group has a story of trials and sufferings, poverty, humility, and hard-won success. The cross-dressing dancer was orphaned as a child; Tarif's super-speedy lead violinist lost his youngest daughter in a terrible accident; we've already mentioned Aunt Juana's addict male family members; and one of the notables passes away enroute.

But do we have to follow the groups in motels and crowded together on the bus, or being told of baggage limitations on US planes? Perhaps all this would have worked, had the mostly clumsy photography not been done with what Manohla Dargis calls "consumer-grade video" cameras--and if, contrary to what some have commented, the transitions from music to talk to on-location background had not so often been so far from smooth. Even this might have been eminently forgivable if the performances were allowed to play through. They never are. A minute or two of music, singing, or dancing--and off to the interviews or the shots of somebody's tiny cottage or of tour members dozing, schmoozing, or boozing on the bus.

Which brings us to the inevitable comparison. There was a film about the range of Romani music made fourteen years ago. At the time it seemed the music was better than the filmmaking, but Tony Gatlif's Latcho Drom (1993) looks like a masterpiece now, and it may be the Gatlif movie that most suits his meandering, impressionistic style.

Latcho Drom uses Romani musicians from seven countries and wordlessly, focusing on the performances, moves across the planet from where the Roma are believed to have begun, in India, to Egypt, and on to Turkey, Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain. Not only does Gatlif's film allow the music to sing, over a wider range of national variations and with a richer sense of locale since each performance is at home rather than on an American stage. But somehow also the suffering of this beleaguered tribe, and the way they've focused their hard times into musical art, emerges more clearly in Latcho Drom than in Gypsy Caravan, despite the latter's plethora of words. One of the things you'll never forget from Gatlif's film is seeing and hearing a Rom survivor of Auschwitz--reminding us that the gypsies were annihilated with gays, Jews, and communists by the Nazis--play a searing dirge expressing his pain against a haunting visual background. And there's also time to see a real "gypsy caravan" of cars and buggies and hear a Parisian tribute to Django Reinhardt, the Romani guitarist who left an indelible mark on jazz music. Latcho Drom (which means "safe journey") has a remarkable flow, and one goes out with the bluesy sounds of the culture in one's ears and a strong sense of the family resemblances between the various styles as one goes westward with the Romani Diaspora.

It's rather sad to learn that the legendary documentarian Albert Maysles was one of the cameramen for Gypsy Caravan. This film, which has too much good material too poorly filmed and organized, is as chintzy and cluttered as some of the Roma houses where the interviews are staged. Too bad Jasmine Dellal didn't let the music speak for itself as Tony Gatlif did.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.