The Art of Amalia

Despite a lengthy career first as an international singing star, and then as a movie actress, Portuguese diva Amalia Rodrigues still remains little known in this country, presumably because the majority of her work was not in English. Now Bruno de Almeida's 90-minute documentary, distilled from a longer, five-hour version, may serve to remedy that, depicting career highlights of the chanteuse whose specialty was a form called the fado ("fate"), a type of tragic lamentation with traditional Portuguese music. If this all sounds a little stodgy, there's an introduction by David Byrne just to prove to you that it's not, and indeed the film makes a good case for Amalia's greatness, with clips from her film debut in the 40s all the way up to her comeback tour of the 90s. Amalia passed away in 1999 just as the film was nearing completion, but as depicted in recent interviews, she appeared full of life up to the last, and even at 79 could have delivered a serious whuppin' to a wanna-be like Celine Dion, both physically and in any kind of singing contest one could conceive of.