If Andrea Bocelli Only claims to be the world’s most popular operative voice, that would be enough reason for a documentary. Every real music lover may be interested in what goes into care and feeding one of the most valuable instruments in the world. Then there is the extra intrigue of how Bocelli gets through the world, as a visible person, constantly on the go. Will we find out that he only has twice the usual coterie by celebrity dealers to help him get his brand? Or does he navigate all his environments with the same security as he commands a scene?
These questions and many more are answered quite satisfactorily in “Andrea Bocelli: Because I believe.” Fans will leave satisfied after seeing that Maestro lives up to what they hope for him-that Bocelli has conquered everything within his domain, artistic or everyday, with a combination of completely hard determination and good tempered gentility. If he has any kind of tortured side, as most artists do, you will not see this, in a documentary that has Bocelli and his boss/wife, Veronica Bocelli, as executive producers as well as stars. Turned to nominal value, Bocelli doesn’t really need to be dark to be interesting. It is as if he submitted all the challenges that he met during the first years into confidence and calm that almost makes it feel that he is living a charmed life, although it must be more complicated than we could know. Everything to say: director Cosima Spender may not be wrong in suggesting that the singer enjoys a much extended attack by good karma.
Doc captures Andrea and Veronica at home on their Tuscan farm, where he grew up as a boy. (If you like rolling slopes or Italian food porn, it may be the movie for you, all classical music is important.) It also takes extended detours to go behind the stage before and after three big concerts that Bocelli performs. One is in the United States at Madison Square Garden. Another is at Terme di Caracalla in Rome, the site of a legendary concert of the three tenors, which Bocelli is now determined to recover with violence that, yes, one tenor. Finally, we visit his annual concert at an amphitheater that he had constructed with the idea that the people would come to him, a place in his hometown called Terme di Caracalla. (The movie does not tell us that this concert is the only time this beautiful arena is open all year, and it is dark the other 364 nights; maybe it was considered too hubry sounding a detail to mention, although it is actually a bit cool.)
Spends do an expert job with cutting back and forth between the modern concert preparation and the biography material that less hardcore fans will still be curious about. Some of the earliest scenes determine how independent he can handle tasks that most of us would not guess – like saddling a horse (although he has a stable hand control of his work) and goes a solo trip and assures us that in a long life as a rider he has only lost once. He and his wife also cycle through the city streets, his hand on the shoulder. “When I had the chance to meet other visually impaired people, I realized he was Batman,” says Veronica. So he’s Bruce Wayne and Caruso. The rear story there is that he had more than a dozen surgeries on his glaucoma eyes as a child before everything got dark at 12. But the level of potentially trauma stood little chance against the greater forces in opera, his great childhood love. He was apparently just as practical with a turntable then when he hilly up LPS with possible additions to his set lists now.
Bocelli did not come to fame until after he was 30, it was pointed out, through a pair of cute Flukes, as being asked to fill in for Pavarotti on a tour that the colleague Italian artist Zucchero Fornacari made from a pop classic hybrid project. A few years later, he was as great in America as he was in Europe and has spent the last quarter of the century as the King of Crossover, even when he still did most of his song in Italian. (His dialogue in the film is completely subtitles in English.) Has it been sunny since then? Quite a lot, it seems – even though spends give us short archive films by a first wife (without further mention of what happened there), and then a first manager, who was apparently pressed until the end of Veronica, when she came on board and large “misunderstandings” led to “a clean break” (also lost from further discussion). Maybe these two blips did not have much more of the driving time, but a viewer may wish they were not bypass so easily, just because, as a movie, the story could stand more of a sense of opponent than it has done.
But is there great pleasure in seeing Bocelli living out what he repeatedly refers to as “a fairy tale”, and when he sees his fans being drunk from the dust? There really is, and of course “because I think” is as wonderful to listen to as it is to watch. It feels gratifying to watch Bocelli go from a bearded, ragg-haired boy in the 30s to a silver-haired older statesman in the 1960s, as if he took his middle age to really grow into his true Omar Sharif himself (to quote a comparison made by his label president). The lack of a beard makes it look like there is some kind of AI manipulation when he drops the jaw. Possibly no one has opened his mouth quite so wide on the screen since Donald Sutherland at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” What comes out is just a little scary, for the unprepared, pop -conditioned ear, but it is a triumph of skill, conditioning, nature and six hours of training days that makes his entire career feel like an extended happy ending. His flock will get a nice buzz even if they do not see it at a cinema serving red wine … although they should still look for one, for best effect.
