January 22, 2002
Copyright © 2002 PUERTO RICO HERALD. All Rights Reserved.
In theaters now is "Piñero," Cuban filmmaker León Ichaso’s valentine to Nuyorican poet, playwright, and actor Miguel Piñero, who died in 1988 of cirrhosis (some say of AIDS) at the age of 42. The film has been stirring almost as much controversy in New York and Florida as that other sanitized boricua — the Puerto Rican Barbie — did in 1997. By and large, reactions run in two directions: The movie is bad because it glorifies a demented junkie, or the movie is good for it addresses "serious" community issues like drug addiction and violence, telling it like it is.
Ironically, the movie is almost great because the research is deliberately bad.
For starters, Piñero airbrushes a few key facts. The Lower East Side, for instance, was not that clean or beautiful during the 1970s. Unlike Ichaso’s attractive color palette implies, many apartment buildings were overcrowded, roach-infested, and lacking in basic services like electricity. Benjamin Bratt, a foot taller than Pinero, well-toned, and even pretty, reads Piñero’s poetry better than he ever did and often looks more like a gentleman Che Guevara defending the oppressed than a homeless junkie, petty thief, and ex-con. Bratt’s girlfriend Sugar (Talisa Soto), who is supposed to be a drug addict and a prostitute, instead resembles a Cover Girl -- or at least a Victoria’s Secret model advertising silk underwear to a salsa beat. Obviously, Ichaso has no interest in the nuances of character, but in texture. Skin and celluloid texture that is.
Almost silly is Ichaso’s tactical avoidance of Piñero’s bisexuality, alleged pedophilia, and the consequences of his often violent behavior. The film’s treatment of Piñero’s hold ups and muggings leaves no doubt that the director wants us to cheer for the perpetrators or take the whole thing as a light joke.
In fact, violence hasn’t looked this much fun and unthreatening in a Latin-themed movie since El Mariachi. To its credit, however, while the film prudishly protects its subject’s "private" life and shrugs off Piñero’s dark side by blaming it on his father’s sexual abuse, it also refuses to moralize or judge any of the writer’s "deviant" behavior, smartly leaving the confounding task to the audience.
But the real contribution of the film lies elsewhere. Although Ichaso glamorizes Piñero and his circumstances to the point of making the film nearly worthless as a biographical exploration or sociology of nuyorican life, the movie itself embodies one of the most important insights of New York’s 1970’s cultural scene: That successful "art" can be made out of filth and junk, and laugh all the way to the bank (if Bratt’s manicured yet compelling performance gets an Oscar, this turn of events will represent yet another example of the truism). In fact, all of the city’s important aesthetic movements during this period were about turning trash into money, and in the process redeem the lives of those expelled from the workforce and — or– degraded for being black, Latino, or queer.
Think of Andy Warhol’s "Factory" films in which anybody — particularly those who would never be given the time of day in Hollywood — could become a "superstar," pimples and all. Or pop art’s recycling of "low" cultural products such as comic books, tabloid headlines, and movie divas into paintings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then there was hip hop’s use of industrial materials like spray paint and crumbling walls, and Nuyorican poetry itself, mixing non-standard forms of English and Spanish, and writing about topics deemed "unaesthetic" by institutionalized culture. So, if the 70’s were mostly about "trash," Miguel Pinero was as trashy as they came, and hence a perfectly suitable artistic representative to the Teflon-coated twenty-first century. Evidence of this is Pinero’s well-known poem, "The Lower East Side Poem"-- also the best response that I have ever read to "En Mi Viejo San Juan":
A thief a junkie I’ve been
committed every known sin…
but this ain’t no lie
when I ask that my ashes be scattered thru
the Lower East Side.
I don’t wanna be buried in Puerto Rico
I don’t wanna rest in long island cemetery
I wanna be near the stabbing shooting
gambling fighting and unnaturally dying
and new birth crying
so please when I die…
don’t take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side…
Given Pinero’s trickster persona and raw talent, it is understandable why Ichaso, who has maintained a fierce sense of independence as a filmmaker of important low-budget movies such as "El Super" and "Bitter Sugar," embraced the task of icon-building. For in many ways, the film is an ode to a more turbulent time in which "bad" was good, drugs use was not frowned upon by decent people, surviving by your wits and not having job was considered an exquisite art form even by wealthy patrons, and the culture of urban minorities had not become watered down by instant commodification. The film even evokes nostalgia for a time when Nuyoricans really existed, New York was the undisputed center of Puerto Rican culture in the U.S. and countercultural warriors roamed the landscape.
Of course, Ichaso could have made a more "realistic" film — which judging by the critics, would have also been a moralistic movie, or at least, one about a "positive" figure — but I wonder who would have sat through 90 minutes in the life of a well-adjusted, self-sacrificing, and hard-working Nuyorican artist with a steady job and a Brooklyn brownstone? I know I wouldn’t have.
Like it or not, the best and worst of Ichaso’s movie is that he did too beautiful a job. Rate for yourself.
