You're looking for light-hearted comedy; you're seeking the chuckle-romp
of ugly Americans stumbling upon the remotest part of the Earth. And after a
half-hour, it's not there, not even with this aging San Francisco blues guy
who looks like Jerry Garcia's pet duck, and not augmented by the fact that
this man wrote "Jet Airliner" for Steve Miller (the historical footnote
everyone remembers from reading the review, and soon forgets as "Genghis
Blues" gets underway.) Your first reaction is to long for the
super-saturated haze of Buena Vista Social Club, which, until now, is the
best movie you've seen all year.
Genghis Blues isn't so much about what it's about--it's about this aging
San Francisco blues guy, Paul Pena, and his journey to Tuva, Outer Mongolia
to participate in a symposium on throat singing. But what it's really about
is forms of communication.
Here's this guy--this blind guy--who in America can barely walk to the
corner store by himself, who wanders around the most expensive city in the
country, which happens to be populated (though not according to any census)
by thousands of confused, alienated, stammering zombie druggie vet types, on
the streets and too gone to serve anyone anymore--and this guy who can't
see (which most people can) eventually becomes enamored of this style of
singing where two very distinct tones can be heard simultaneously (and most
people have a hard enough time carrying one tune!) And he's invited to build
a bond with the Tuvans by entering their throat-singing contest; he learns
the language of the Tuvans, or at least fifty words of it; he gets a couple
of filmmakers and a pottymouthed SF-hipster Pacifica DJ interested, and
then he and they are off to board a big old jet airliner and transfer in
Moscow to a small plane with its very own emergency rope. There's no direct
flight from America to Tuva.
The Tuvan people are awed by Pena, but his own feelings are mixed. His
linguistic limitations, coupled with the complete loss of bearings that
comes with being in a strange place and not being able to see anything,
frighten him--but he can't go home, won't go home, whatever--Tuva is an
undeveloped, greatly uncivilized land, a place where an evening's
entertainment is skinning a goat for blood sausage, a shamanistic culture
with thousand-year-old shrines and evil spells cast upon those who don't
know better, and the lack of true cultural identity in the Western World
(not quite Chinese, not quite Russian, and only known because of the way
they sing) resonates within Pena, who feels his own presence in the world is
ignored, most of the time.
It's an important social commentary, Genghis Blues is. It's not by any
means uplifting; it shows the dreams and fears of the downtrodden and
disabled, and the geographical extremes one such person had to go to, to find
a shred of acceptance.
And you leave the little theatre on 12th St., which usually shows Japanese
existentialist cinema and GG Allin concert flicks, and you can't believe
you're still in a two-block radius of the wide-screen, stadium-seating,
Sno-Caps-til-ya-heave Union Square theatre showing Runaway Bride.
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