Fados

The fado is a dolorous folk-song tradition from Portugal, first sung in the early 19th century by barefoot peasants mending nets and contemplating a roiling black Atlantic. It has survived to the present day, providing MP3 succor to middle-class professionals on antidepressants — lyric: “It was God’s will that I live with anxiety.” Now it’s the subject of a film revue by the venerable Carlos Saura. Contemporary celebs appear alongside ghosts (Amália “Queen of Fado” Rodrigues). Saura is formally ambitious — a troupe travels through the film, articulating lyrics in dance — but the movie missteps when departing wholly from the intrinsic nostalgia of its subject, as the seventysomething director imposes his idea of contemporary cool: interspersed hip-hop trio NBC, SP & Wilson and Brazilian reggae artist Toni Garrido. Sequestering performers into warehouse-studio spaces adds a certain chill to the proceedings, but there are happy exceptions. Nonagenarian Argentina Santos fills her single-take frame with stout gravitas. The penultimate scene takes place in the House of Fados, a Freed Unit version of a Lisbon barroom, its walls a graveyard of head shots, where song is passed around like a challenge and teenaged Carminho shuts the place down.