'The flamenco guitar of Yerai Cortés': C. Tangana, Elon Musk and a “gypsy” and “modern” artist | Culture

The flamenco guitar of Yerai Cortés puts the culmination of a fruitful year of biopics Spanish musicals. Second prize, The blue star and this documentary is three films that, each in its own way, investigate the identity and artistic driving force of its main characters. If Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez, who sign the most exceptional of the lot, offer a portrait of a certain generational nihilism of the nineties passed through the get up early of the Albaicín, in Javier Macipe's emotional film about the ill-fated rocker Mauricio Aznar, the search reaches Argentine folklore. Perhaps Kike Maíllo's film could be included Disco, Ibiza, Locomía, but music is not central to a story focused, above all, on the fan phenomenon.

In the debut feature by Antón Álvarez, also known as C. Tangana or PuchoCortés' flamenco is, however, crucial. The feeling when watching it is that of witnessing a double search: that of the main character and his need to exorcise his family traumas, and that of the director himself, whose curiosity and audacity transcend disciplines.

At the start, Álvarez has a coffee with porras at the Café Gijón in Madrid. It is a fixed shot in which the musician, producer and now director explains – with a look and a texture that refer to the old television language – how the film we are going to see was born. It was on the night that Tangana saw Cortés play for the first time. It caught his attention because “the gypsies called him a gypsy and the moderns called him modern.” Coincidentally, that was also the night when thousands of Madrid residents were amazed by a strange phenomenon in the sky: an Indian row of stars, the Starlink satellites sent into space by Elon Musk.

Space images open and close a documentary that plays its best asset when it is closest to the ground. Pucho, as Álvarez is called all the time in the film, acts as master of ceremonies with his questions, achieving an oral game rich in nuances. Between words and music, the secret that Cortés' album contains is unearthed in a film that stands out when his parents enter the scene.

Álvarez proposes a documentary that allows itself to be infected by the life outside the filming, a commonplace of naturalistic language that is well resolved. Where the gears squeak the most is in the contrast caused by some musical numbers and their effortful artifice or in certain aspects of Cortés' sentimental life, which end up being confusing. In the end, and between brilliant moments and other more anecdotal ones, The flamenco guitar of Yerai Cortés he makes his way fluctuating between his double ambition, music and image.