If Andrea Bocelli only laid claim to being the world’s most popular operatic voice, that would be reason enough for a documentary. Any real music lover might take an interest in what goes into the care and feeding of one of the most valuable instruments in the world. Then there’s the additional intrigue of just how Bocelli makes his way through the world, as a sightless person, constantly on the go. Will we find out that he just has twice the usual coterie of celebrity handlers, to help get him to his mark? Or does he navigate all his environments with the same surety with which he commands a stage?
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These questions and many more are answered pretty satisfactorily in “Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe.” Fans will leave satisfied having seen that the maestro lives up to what they hope of him — that Bocelli has conquered everything in his domain, artistic or mundane, with a combination of utterly fierce determination and good-tempered gentility. If he does have any kind of tortured side, as most artists do, you won’t see it here, in a documentary that has Bocelli and his manager/wife, Veronica Bocelli, as executive producers as well as stars. Taken at face value, though, Bocelli doesn’t really have to go dark to be interesting. It’s as if he sublimated all the challenges he faced in his early years into a confidence and calm that almost make it feel like he’s living a charmed life, even if it has to be more complicated than we could know. All to say: Director Cosima Spender may not be wrong in suggesting that the singer is enjoying a very extended bout of good karma.
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The doc captures Andrea and Veronica at home on their Tuscan country estate, where he grew up as a boy. (If you like rolling hillsides or Italian food porn, this may be the movie for you, all classical music matters aside.) It also takes extended detours to go backstage before and after three big concerts Bocelli is performing. One is in the U.S. at Madison Square Garden. Another is at Terme Di Caracalla in Rome, the site of a legendary concert by the Three Tenors, which Bocelli is now determined to retake by force as, well, the One Tenor. Finally, we visit his annual concert at an amphitheater he had constructed with the idea that the people would come to him, a place in his hometown called Terme Di Caracalla. (The movie doesn’t tell us that this concert is the only time this beautiful venue is open all year, and it’s dark the other 364 nights; maybe that was deemed too hubristic-sounding a detail to mention, though it’s actually kind of cool.)
Spender does an expert job of cutting back and forth between the modern-day concert prep and the biograpical material that less hardcore fans will still be curious about. Some of the earliest scenes establish just how independently he is able to manage tasks most of us wouldn’t guess — like saddling up a horse (although he has a stable hand check his work) and going for a solo ride, assuring us that in a long life as a horseman, he’s only gotten lost once. He and his wife also bike through city streets, his hand on her 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 backstory there is that he had more than a dozen operations on his glaucoma-ridden eyes as a child before everything went dark at 12. Yet that level of potential trauma stood little chance against the greater forces of opera, his great childhood love. He was apparently as handy with a turntable needle then as he is cuing up LPs of possible additions to his setlists now.
Bocelli didn’t come to fame until after he was 30, it’s pointed out, through a couple of sweet flukes, like being asked to fill in for Pavarotti on a tour the fellow Italian artist Zucchero Fornaciari was doing of a pop-classical hybrid project. A few years later, he was as big in America as he was in Europe, and has spent the last quarter-century as the king of crossover, even while still doing most of his singing in Italian. (His dialogue in the film is all subtitled into English.) Has it all been sunny since then? Pretty much, it would seem — although Spender does give us brief archival footage of a first wife (with no further mention of what happened there), and then a first manager, who apparently got pushed to the exit by Veronica, once she came on board and major “misunderstandings” led to “a clean break” (also dropped from further discussion). Maybe these two blips didn’t bear that much more of the running time, but a viewer may wish they didn’t get bypassed so easily, if only because, as a movie, the story could stand more of a sense of adversarialism than it has.
But are there great pleasures in seeing Bocelli live out what he repeatedly refers to as “a fairy tale,” and in seeing his fans get intoxicated from the dust? There certainly are, and of course “Because I Believe” is as lovely to listen to as it is to look at. It feels gratifying watching Bocelli go from a bearded, shaggy-haired boy wonder in his 30s to a silvery-haired elder statesman in his 60s, like he took his middle age to really grow into his true Omar Sharif self (to cite a comparison his label president makes). The lack of a beard now makes it look like there is some kind of AI manipulation going on when he drops his jaw. Possibly no one has opened his mouth quite so wide on screen since Donald Sutherland at the end of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” What comes out is just a little frightening, to the unprepared, pop-conditioned ear, but it’s a triumph of skill, conditioning, nature and six-hour practice days that makes his whole career feel like an extended happy ending. His flock will get a pleasant buzz even if they don’t see it in a cinema that serves red wine … though they should still look for one, for best effect.
