In general, I love feature-length documentaries. I've never actually reviewed one, though, possibly because it would feel like cheating to write about something I enjoy so much, particularly when BBC4 makes them so readily available on TV. This was how I found Searching for Sugar Man, as part of the Storyville documentary strand, which could probably provide me with my requisite two articles per week for the next year if I so wished.
The story here is a simple one, told with the minimum of fuss by director Malik Bendjelloul, who remains entirely unobtrusive as he speaks with all parties involved. It concerns the album Cold Fact, which, in the seventies, was as much a part of the sonic landscape in white middle class South Africa as the likes of Abbey Road or Bridge Over Troubled Water. The only difference, in fact, was that Cold Fact and its originator, one Sixto Rodriguez, remained completely and utterly unknown in any other part of the world.
As with all the best legends the origins of Cold Fact were shrouded in mist, or perhaps myth - rumour had it that its fame spread via multiple cassette copies of a single vinyl album brought across by somebody's girlfriend from the US to South Africa. And Rodriguez himself? Long dead. Popular opinion ran that he committed suicide on stage - some versions said that he shot himself, others that he set himself alight.
As the owner of a record shop noted for importing copies of the album, Stephen "Sugar" Segerman eventually came to be regarded as the authority on the topic, to the extent that he was asked to write the liner notes for Rodriguez' second album, Coming From Reality. Acutely aware of how little was known about the man, Segerman used the notes to ask for people to come forward if they knew anything about this musical enigma.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes it isn't; word eventually got as far as one of Rodriguez' daughters, who was able to confirm that rumours of his death had been greatly exaggerated. He was alive and well, working as a carpenter in the same down-at-heel Detroit neighbourhood he had described in Cold Fact, with no idea that his eventual return to South Africa would be on a par with the second coming of Elvis.
Searching for Sugar Man keeps things consistently intimate, speaking to Rodriguez' family and associates rather than the fans. The visuals are stark and simple, making the most of the fact that large swathes of modern-day Detroit are starting to look like the remnants of a lost civilisation. Occasional animated segments are seamlessly integrated, adding texture to a film that would otherwise simply be a collection of talking heads. And then there's the music itself, smooth, sad, folk rock that plays like a more populist, more mournful Dylan, bringing us into Rodriguez' world in a way that makes it easy to see why disenfranchised South Africans would take him to their hearts.
This is a gently upbeat film, and one with enough faith in its subject not to bother with cheap emotional manipulation. By the end I felt a renewed confidence in humanity, and in the strength of human nature. All in all, it was a wonderful way to ease myself into the weekend.
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