ONE of the lessons of this warm, easygoing documentary “The Underground Orchestra” is that the Paris police come down much harder on people who use video cameras in subway stations than they do on people who play music for 10-franc coins.
(Indeed it seems that you can barely point a camera anywhere near a train before tough plainclothes officers appear and make you rewind your film.)
And if the street musicians filmed here are at all representative, it would also seem that Parisian buskers are of a much, much higher quality than most of those to be found in New York.
Dutch documentarian Heddy Honigmann has fashioned a gentle, unhurried ride through a fascinating, musically diverse world. Her initial focus on foreign street musicians working in and around the Paris Metro expands to cover other exiled musicians who have made the French capital their home.
The result is part concert, part meditation on exile. It is also a low-key, but no less effective celebration of Paris in all its cosmopolitan glory.
We meet a Venezuelan harpist, a two-thirds African – one third French blues trio, a Bosnian army deserter/violinist who once played in his national orchestra and a Romanian family who take turns on the zither, violin and accordion.
Then, as the movie widens its focus, we encounter musical refugees from all over the French-speaking world: a beautiful singer from Mali, a wonderful guitarist from Algeria, and other singers from Vietnam and Zaire.
There’s also an Argentine pianist who doesn’t play in the streets, but tells the story of his imprisonment and torture (naturally, they broke his hands) back home.
Sure these people miss their homelands and several of them have immigration and housing problems, but Paris seems to welcome them and their music. And a series of traveling shots of Parisian streets and rooftops at dusk, with various exotic kinds of music in the background makes it easy to understand why any refugee would want to stay.
Despite an apparently mistaken presumption that her non-white interviewees must suffer grievously from the racism of the French police, Honigmann’s questioning successfully evokes the uniqueness of each of these lives – and the good humor that all of them seem to share. The result is a kind of sweetness that all but makes up for the film’s shapelessness and its lack of any pounding revelations.
