Buena Vista Social Club: Adios (2017)

Directed by: Lucy Walker | 110 minutes | documentary | Starring: Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Manuel ‘Guajiro’ Mirabal, Guajirito Mirabal

In 1997 the musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club introduced the world to the Cuban son with their album of the same name. The ensemble – consisting of musicians who are now quite elderly – became even more famous thanks to the music documentary of the same name by Wim Wenders from 1999.

Director Lucy Walker made an unofficial sequel to that famous Wenders film with ‘Buena Vista Social Club: Adios’. In this film the band members look back on their special careers and on the wonderful heyday of the group. The film offers a doubly nostalgic portrait: we see the musicians today looking back with nostalgia at the extreme success they experienced in the autumn of their lives, and through archive footage also the nostalgia they felt for the 1950s, when the Cuban music (and herself) was in its heyday. Finally, as viewers, we feel our own nostalgia for the late 1990s when we discovered and embraced these elderly Cubans en masse.

It all started with three men and a wild plan: the American guitarist Ry Cooder, the British music producer Nick Gold and the Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos González three started in the mid-1990s a search for the best living musicians of the Cuban son – a genre that reached its peak in the 1950s. The origin of the son, says ‘Buena Vista Social Club: Adios’, lies in the late 19th century, when the music of the enslaved Africans mixed with Spanish songs and guitar playing. In the 1920s and 1930s, countless son classics emerged, which were frequently performed in the many clubs in Cuba in the booming 1940s and 1950s. They were strictly segregated: either intended for the white elite and American tourists, or for the poorer, black population. One of the ‘social clubs’ for the latter group was the Buena Vista Social Club in Havana.

The film begins with a tour of the neighborhood where the club must have once stood. Older local residents can still point it out. Where once the famous songs were played, there is now a gym. Juan de Marcos tells how the musicians were found in the 1990s. That was not easy: most had already retired for years; some have fallen into oblivion, or have slipped into poverty. Via others, musicians such as Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Eliades Ochoa, Rubén Gonzalez and Guajiro Mirabal managed to sniff up and record an album with them full of classics from their time. No one would have dreamed what happened next: in the late 1990s there was not a party or birthday that was not accompanied by the characteristic sounds. In no time 500,000 albums had been sold and in 1998 the entire group performed for the first time in the Amsterdam concert hall and shortly afterwards in the famous American Carnegie Hall. The film shows images of those exciting days; of the chaotic rehearsals to say the least prior to the ensemble’s first live concerts in that line-up and the eventual, unparalleled performances. The images are a reminder of how special the performers were, how gracefully they handled their success, and how beautiful the music still is.

Interspersed with images from those turbulent years after the album’s release, the film jumps back to historical images of the son and her interpreters and of the origin of songs – such as the legendary ‘Chan Chan’ that Compay Segundo wrote. We discover where the legendary photo on the album cover was taken and who can be seen in it. We learn about the hard life the good Ibrahim Ferrer had, and about the typical Cuban family history of Omara Portuondo.

In fact, it is only towards the end of the documentary that Walker shows how the members of the group have fared in recent years; while that is what this film adds to the earlier legendary portrait of Wenders. The dwindling group – Compay Segundo passed away (at the age of 97!) in 2003, as did pianist Rubén González, and Ibrahim Ferrer died in 2005, four days after his last performance – has not lost any of its bravado and is still performing always on. Grandchildren of band members fill in the vacant spots.

The film also shows the special performance the band gave in 2015 at the American White House, at the invitation of then-President Obama, and the death of Fidel Castro a year later. Yet there is no further reflection on this, neither about the future nor about Cuba – the country will have to live on without this generation anyway. And so the strength of the documentary is at the same time its weakness: the past – no matter how beautiful – in itself is not enough without looking at the present.