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Rating:
The last months of a man perpetually adrift.
A film terribly dark and immersed in a leaden existential fog with no final redemption, featuring black and white as sharp and cold as the barrel of a gun, relentless as if it were aimed at our temples waiting for endless minutes for the decisive finger on the trigger.
This film-documentary talks about the life, death, and miracles of the man-Chet Baker, far from the legend and myth he has embodied for decades in the world of jazz (and beyond).
Acclaimed (and extremely limited) jazz trumpeter, with many wives, four children, numerous lovers, friends, admirers, and unending creditors. Grossly unfaithful to everyone and everything, he allegedly had ONLY two great and true loves: music and heroin.
A vérité-documentary that sinks a sharp blade into the dark personality, reserved and secluded personality of a man perpetually adrift from everything. A ruthless and raw portrait, however, far from mythologizing and easy approval, at times thus unpleasant, describing a fragile musician with a thousand defects who, also thanks to this, makes us feel closer and more human, almost like an older brother asking for help.
All the work of Bruce Weber, fashion photographer with vague cinematic ambitions, who followed the last months of Chet Baker's life (who died in 1988 falling from a hotel in Amsterdam, perhaps in a heroin-induced state) paying tribute to his death with a sort of film-obituary of truly exquisite aesthetic beauty and profound and true content to the extreme consequences.
The director lingers over Chet's face, exploring it like an X-ray of the soul, talking about his dark sides with interviews and testimonies, in addition to the protagonist, to the people who knew him, his children, lovers, and his entire universe, returning moments of sublime candor thanks to dramatically sublime images.
A slow descent into physical and psychological degradation thus, of a man now at the mercy of a drug called “existence,” an agony towards an announced death, dictated by time marking the rhythm of things and becoming a true obsession of an artist, in the grip of puerile narcissism and that feeds for a good part of the film (a good two hours), giving us an uncomfortable character and in many ways a “loser in the soul.”
An artist, however, who has (unfortunately) leveraged this aspect of himself and who, thanks also to his thin voice and “clinging to a thread of raw sadness” and his slender, gentle phrasing, always on the edge of “breaking into a thousand streams of notes, fragile like crystals,” has managed to elevate his marginalized condition to a first-rate artistic star, subliming his life to art (but not vice versa).
A film that is nothing short of enchanting and truly moving for the ruthless and sincere portrait made with sincere devotion and infinite humanity.
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