The lasting allure of Chet Baker

'Let's Get Lost' captures the seductive power of the conflicted jazzman

January 25, 2008|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Early on in "Let's Get Lost," Bruce Weber's 1989 documentary about Chet Baker, the jazz trumpeter is asked if he'd like a glass of wine. "Yeah," he replies in that wispy exhale of a voice that always made his singing sound so imperiled - and irresistible. The way Baker pronounces the word you hear diffidence, avidity, resignation, possibly even thirst. It may be that no syllable has been more seductively uttered in a movie. It also may be that no documentary has ever been more seductive than "Let's Get Lost."

Since von Sternberg last shared a sound stage with Dietrich, has director so clearly been in love with star?

Weber's film opens a two-week run at the Brattle today. Its original local engagement was there, too. That was barely a year after Baker's death, and the documentary had an inescapable funerary aura to it, verging on necrophilia. Weber's camera was that worshipful, the black-and-white cinematography that gorgeous. The effect was at once creepy and prophetic. The Baker shown on the beach at Santa Monica, steering a bumper car, riding in the backseat of a '50s convertible was a doomed man, and a sense of impending death hung over the documentary. (Baker, 58, fell from a hotel window in Amsterdam; his death was ruled an accident.)

Two decades later, seen completely on its own terms, "Let's Get Lost" appears quite different. Its look is still ravishing. Weber is a highly regarded photographer, and his superb eye is everywhere evident (a newly struck print does that eye full, lustrous justice). More important, Baker as subject remains an absolutely compelling mix of allure and awfulness. But now the documentary has an almost-timeless quality. Yes, it's about Baker, obviously, but a Baker who's somehow both much more and much less than the man seen on screen.

It's hard to exaggerate just how beautiful Baker was when young: prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes, square jaw, sensual mouth. Weber's inclusion of extensive archival footage casts into all the greater relief what a wreck Baker had become. He was a kind of aural Dorian Gray: The aspen-leaf voice staying ageless, the delivery improving even, as the face tightens into decay and corruption.

At various moments, the latter-day Baker can seem to resemble Sam Shepard, Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp, or Matt Dillon (it's the eyes). Such names underscore how good-looking he had been - as with a classical ruin, much beauty still lay amid the rubble. But there being so many lookalikes gets at an even more important truth about Baker: what a moral chameleon he was.