Parents' Guide to Fito Páez: The World Within a Song

This is a documentary best for ardent fans. Early on, Fito Páez says he dislikes documentaries that turn people into saints and scrub out their malice. Fito Páez: The World Within a Song then spends two hours doing exactly that to him. Matías Gueilburt, a friend of Páez, directed it, which explains the devotion, and the devotion seals the film off from anyone who arrives without the entire discography memorized. Newcomers will learn a few things, like the fact that Páez wrote "Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón," which Mercedes Sosa turned into a standard, but mostly they will sit in front of an altar. Nobody needs the film to attack him, but the celebration keeps it from reaching deep into his creative process. He also controls the movie so completely that stretches of it stop making narrative sense. The murders of his grandmother and his aunt, which happened while he was a young artist living away from home, produce the one place where a life and the songs it made connect. Gueilburt needed far more of that. He stays afraid to contradict Páez, to provoke him, to dig.

The good stuff arrives when Páez surprises himself. In London he asks a driver to take him to Abbey Road Studios, and when the man doesn't immediately understand, Páez turns to the camera in disbelief and explains that the Beatles recorded there, as though his references belong to everyone. Small moments like that humble him, and they earn the film its best minutes. So does watching him cross Madrid, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, New York, and London, where the recognition varies enormously, and where a man who once drew crowds of women outside his hotel now walks down a street unbothered. Gueilburt shoots the music-making and thinking sequences wide and lets the image open up, then narrows back to television format for the talking, a lovely piece of cinematic grammar. An older artist surviving something catastrophic and going back to work moves you regardless. Fans will love this; everyone else, good luck trying to enter it.