newcritics

Bruce Weber has made a career out of fetishizing the human body as a photographer of homoerotic art books, Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” advertising, and the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs. His photographs seem to embody anonymous sex, a style that lends itself well to commercials, with their promise of immediate gratification. In Let’s Get Lost, Weber’s 1987 film about the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, he found his perfect subject, a performer who in the 1950s burst onto the jazz scene as a living, breathing fetish with greek-god looks and a beautiful talent, then squandered his gifts in the pursuit of heroin, fast cars, and women.

Weber is a master of light, and Let’s Get Lost is most of all a visual experience. Shot in Weber’s signature black and white style, the director cross-cuts footage of Baker in the 1950s, looking like Leonardo DiCaprio playing James Dean, with the ravaged Baker of the 1980s. After thirty years of little work and all play, the boy-wonder looks like the dregs of a Tom Waits song. Weber manages to weave the two together so skillfully that watching the movie feels like one long tracking shot following a Dorian Grey to his bitter end.

The movie is a documentary that was made with Baker’s support just before his death (the editing was even not complete before he fell from an apartment window in Amsterdam). It interlaces snippets of Baker’s performances with commentary from musicians who played with him (not many left—most had died of overdoses), ex-wives (three) and girlfriends (two, eager to tell their woeful tales to the camera). By all accounts, Baker was the worst kind of junkie: a con man, a manipulator, utterly selfish and only interested in his next high.

If Baker was hoping to con Weber into some sort of hagiography or redemption tale, he picked the wrong filmmaker. Weber is obviously in love with the looks of the young Chet Baker, but more interested in his fall from grace. (Baker had all his teeth punched out in mysterious circumstances in the 1960s and wears dentures; his face is as cracked as a dry creek bed). In the 1980s, trumpet in hand, he sings more than he plays, with his trademark soft voice mostly intact. But his performing is no longer effortless, he strains for notes. His mobile eyebrows and wincing mouth work overtime.

Weber is overtly manipulative, using his editing to reveal Baker as a liar. In an interview with Baker’s sweet-faced mother, who appears to be in her eighties, Weber lets her spin out a homey tale about Chet’s first trumpet and early success. Then Weber asks her, “Despite his musical achievements, did he disappoint you as a son?” She flinches and says, “Yes.” She pauses for several seconds, carefully masking her emotions, “But let’s not get into that.”

The movie would just be another one of Weber’s exercises in voyeurism were Chet Baker not still able to charm the camera, despite everything. After all the damage he had done to himself, he is still fascinating to watch—a character, a storyteller, and a musician who may or may not have been touched by genius—it’s hard to tell with him. Occasionally you catch a glimpse of the beautiful, talented, young man in the old man’s face, like a light shining in the dark.

Ultimately, it is in the interplay between moviemaker and subject where this movie really gets interesting. Two men who made their careers fooling people; one at the top of his game, which everyone understands as a game; the other, who most cruelly fooled himself, at the bottom. The one on top holds the camera, and he can’t stop staring into the abyss.

Let’s Get Lost was itself “lost” for nearly 14 years, out of circulation and unavailable in video or DVD, but is currently being shown in a newly restored print at New York City’s Film Forum, through July 3.