Much of the soundtrack of Spain, like it more or less, has come out of the mouth and scratched throat of Joaquín Sabina. Whether it’s a hymn like ‘And they gave us ten o’clock’ or a macarada to the rhythm of ‘Pacto entre caballeros’, the singer-songwriter has been dedicated to music for 45 years and the drums of withdrawal are beginning to sound. As part of this farewell procession, which includes a tour and a new album for 2023, it includes ‘Sentiendo lo mucho’, a documentary by Fernando León de Aranoa that is not limited to friendly complacency.
I was never fond of requiem masses
Aranoa could have gone for a friendly and sympathetic vision of the one from Úbeda, but instead choose to make a portrait of an artist who knows that his time is getting shorter and shorter and, despite everything, he can’t help but feel panic whenever he has to go on stage. Sabina’s excesses, anger, bad faces, disappointments and sadness are the focus of much of a documentary that is far from being a walk in the park to please the fans.
The most interesting thing about ‘Sentiendo lo mucho’ is far from the stage: it shines in the dressing rooms, at the singer’s house, in the tour cars and in a Mexico that shows that, as much as he remembers the bohemian nights of his youth, he will never go back. Now, the partying and drunkenness have been transformed into hundreds of cell phones recording every second of her public life, and the songs with Chavela are now versions that a mariachi group perpetrates for a Sabina who, more than enjoying, remembers what she enjoyed.
Completely moving away from good intentions and “he still has a long way to go”, the documentary faces a stage of creative dryness in which the singer, convinced that good love songs cannot be made, but only heartbreaktakes refuge in his previous successes in the company of Jimena, a mainstay that proves to be Sabina’s union with the real world. After years of being a brawler, it was time for him to settle down at seventy.
We have sex and rock and drugs
Being able to be a review of his life, ‘Sentiendo lo mucho’ is rather a tuning up of his last decadefrom compositions with friends full of drugs, alcohol and laughter to poetry in a car (“On the Charles Bridge I learned to rhyme scar with epidemic”) or the misstep linked to the stroke in the WiZink. In fact, that is the beginning of the film: Sabina asking Aranoa not to start with that misstep. But she is wrong to ask him because it is not, by far, the hardest part of the footage.
Because Sabina, who has already shown everything she has to prove (at one point she states that I will never write a song this good again like his best twenty songs), he is not afraid to open up, and talk about, for example, the drug, everything he gave and took from him, his longing and at the same time temperance and pride of not needing to get involved even for pure health. Even if we all knew what was behind it, it’s surprising to see an artist of this stature speak so unscrupulously about the need he had for cocaine in his life, not only personally, but creatively.
No matter how much you smile, hug, sing and smoke, there are very few moments throughout the footage where Sabina seems really happy. It almost seems as if he had moved permanently to Melancholy Street, the smiles were fake and the only real thing that remained were fears, nostalgia and yesterday.
Pure and gold, Manolete
Much of the documentary is fabulous. Really. I don’t know if Aranoa’s intention showing the most human face of Sabina was remove the mask and show us the sufferer under the playboy, the ex-drug addict in love, to the singer-songwriter without songs, but he succeeds in spades, and it’s surprising. Nevertheless, at one point the film goes into a tailspin.
It is true that You cannot talk about Joaquín Sabina without mentioning bullfightingbut the twenty long minutes that the show dedicates to a bullfight followed by the fucking of José Tomás, even though it shows the singer more concerned than ever, are not justified. Much less are the close-ups of dead or dying bulls.. The documentary remains there in a dry dock and getting up is almost impossible.
He succeeds right at the end, when Sabina try to sing the song from the movie (“I’ve always wanted to grow old without dignity even though the rifle doesn’t even have a cartridge left”) but he can’t concentrate, either because he has little voice left -increasingly ragged and impossible to sing-, because of the cameras or using any other excuse . The singer has no problem leaving Aranoa and Leiva (omnipresent in a film in which there is hardly any memory for the much more important Pancho Varona in his life) and to escape as only the stars know how to do, aware of their own shutdownlamenting that, after almost five decades, they will not be able to write the most beautiful song in the world.