Fado is the distinctly Portuguese musical tradition of balladeering: often (but not always) melancholy tunes about unrequited love, loss, unrequited-love-lost and Lisbon, trilled against a gently weeping guitar and mandolin backup. A good analogy for the prominence, cultural distinction and versatility of fado music would be the blues.
In Fados, eminent Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura pays
non-narrative tribute to the genre and its practitioners. As with
Saura’s earlier Flamenco, this is no PBS documentary, but rather
a total-immersion experience in the art, with a series of fado
song-and-dance numbers, performed on a simple yet spectacular stage
festooned with vividly colored scrims and screens with apt projected
images.
Fadistas of all ages perform — including recent
PlayhouseSquare guest Mariza — with some of the departed greats
represented in archival clips (no Fado for Dummies captions or
liner notes; I think I recognized the legendary Amália
Rodrigues, but don’t ask me who the dude in the Roy Orbison glasses
was).
For non-Portuguese viewers who mainly associate Maltese crosses with
Snoopy fighting the Red Baron, Fados can be a cryptic but also a
passionate, sensual and exhilarating experience, with a climactic “Casa
di Fados” sequence a standout, as a mockup café of vocalists
each take their turn in a sort of melodious dialogue. As with the
blues, fado is adaptable indeed, and one is struck by the Pete
Seeger-like tone of a fado political-protest song and an interesting
attempt to blend fado and hip-hop in tribute to a street poet.
This article appears in Apr 15-21, 2009.