El Cantante Movie Synopsis:
EL CANTANTE celebrates the life and music of the legendary Puerto Rican salsa singer Héctor Lavoe, a pioneer of the sound and sensibility that redefined Latin music in the 1960s and 1970s. Directed by Leon Ichaso, the film is a labor of love for its stars, Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, who are both New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent. Shepherded to the screen and produced by Lopez, EL CANTANTE portrays an era when a new sense of national identity and pride took root in Puerto Rican communities across the U.S. Héctor Lavoe’s music was both a soundtrack to and affirmation of that awakening, and that music courses joyfully through EL CANTANTE.
Spanning the 1960s to the 1980s, EL CANTANTE charts Héctor Lavoe’s rapid rise to success and fame as an artist whose music combined Puerto Rican tradition with streetwise modernity, unabashed emotion with straightforward realism. It reveals the singer not only as an architect of salsa but as its soul; the kind of artist, like Billie Holliday, Edith Piaf or La Lupe, who forges an uncanny emotional bond with his audience. Love, pain, joy, pride, sorrow, endurance: Héctor Lavoe’s singing contained the raw stuff of life as ordinary people — and he himself — knew it. As Héctor Lavoe, Anthony mines the contradictory essence of a gifted man who could express anything with his music, but channeled his inner turmoil into a host of self-destructive behaviors. Anthony’s intensity and honesty is matched by that of Lopez, who portrays Héctor Lavoe’s indomitable wife, Puchi. In their first onscreen pairing, the real-life couple captures the complex dynamics of a relationship between two bright, funny and flawed human beings who loved, battled and forgave one another for twenty years, until Héctor Lavoe’s death in 1993.
