Searching for Sugar Man (2012)

Directed by: Malik Bendjelloul | 86 minutes | documentary, music, biography

Documentary maker Malik Bendjelloul was in South Africa in 2006 looking for a good story for a new project. He had previously worked for Swedish television on documentaries with strikingly bizarre subjects, such as the one about a man who lived for eighteen years at the Paris airport Charles de Gaulle; about a special army division that trained its soldiers to walk through walls; and more unlikely and extraordinary stories.

So Bendjelloul wasn’t looking for just any story and when he walked into a record store in Cape Town and struck up a conversation with owner Stephen Segerman who told him about one Sixto “Sugar Man” Rodriguez – a mysterious singer whose album Cold Fact strikes a chord touched in the 1970s with a generation of white youth rebelling against a repressive government and its system of apartheid – Bendjelloul knew he was on to something. An American of Mexican descent, Rodriguez is a legendary pop icon in South Africa whose fame rivals that of The Beatles and other greats in pop history.

The only thing that distinguished Rodriguez from his contemporaries was that there seemed to be absolutely no information about this Latino Bob Dylan, no one knew who he was, where he was or if he was still alive at all. The wildest stories circulated about his death, for example that he committed suicide during a performance by setting himself on fire. All they knew about him was what was in his lyrics, and in them he emerged as a metropolitan poet who sings about the seamy side of life with critical slurs to government and references to sex and drugs. Rodriguez’s riddle continued to haunt Stephen Segerman and others, and in the late 1990s they decided to look for him with surprising results.

The bizarre story of the documentary ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ can be told as a compelling fictional drama. The interviewees are aware of the improbability of the story and mention this from time to time, yet ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ does everything it can to not come across as fictional. Visually, ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ transcends the level of the average documentary: except for the interviews, documentary maker Bendjelloul makes grateful use of all kinds of cinematographic techniques that we would rather expect in a regular Hollywood production. For example, a camera mounted on the hood of a car and filming Segerman behind the wheel while driving atmospherically along a coastal road, and also the frequent use of crane shots that lift the viewer up and down in the suburbs of Detroit or in Cape Town, to fall upon. What we are more and more used to seeing in documentaries after ‘Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media’ (1992), are animations and all kinds of graphic inventions to convey the message or a feeling. Or in the case of ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ to fill in the gaps in the story for which there are no images. Director Bendjelloul does this through his own drawings and computer animations depicting Rodriguez and his austere urban habitat.

Most striking, however, is the use of a side-scrolling camera that follows Rodriguez in profile as he walks the sidewalk through Detroit. The sidewalk thus changes into an endless stage with the raw industrial beauty of Detroit in winter as a backdrop; the loss of perspective gives it something monumental like a large panoramic painting. They are all visual techniques that are mainly intended to create an atmosphere: the contrast between the bleak and squalid suburbs of Detroit by Sixto Rodriguez and the sunny “laid-back” South Africa, where “Sugar Man” Rodriguez has a hero status, but at the same time is the great absentee.

South Africa had a social and political system of apartheid until the mid-1990s, making it the only country where racism was institutionalized, yet, as this story shows, there was a large white liberal counter-movement that embraced Mexican Rodriguez. This in contrast to America, where a Mexican protest singer was once a step too far. In addition to a search for an enigmatic pop icon, ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ is also a story about two cultures and about a shadowy period in South African history.

‘Searching for Sugar Man’ doesn’t excel in factual or informative thoroughness, nor are there a few loose ends that could have been further explored by Bendjelloul, such as the issue of royalties that never got to Rodriguez. Finally, Bendjelloul seems to want to perpetuate the myth of “Sugar Man” Rodriguez by barely letting him speak, we hear his daughters, a colleague and friends, who shine a scarce light on the personal motivations and perception of Rodriguez, but Rodriguez remains the big absentee again. What remains, however, is more than enough for an excellent and compelling documentary that, in addition to a powerful cinematography, of course also stands out due to a great soundtrack. And of course we can write the latter on behalf of the great “Sugar Man” Rodriguez himself.