LET'S GET LOST (1988) ★

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can make a whole movie out of nothing more than a director's fascination with a particular face. This probably goes double when your director is a fashion photographer like our director here, Bruce Weber—someone for whom "the way people look" is already an overriding concern. And the genius of Weber choosing jazz luminary Chet Baker as his documentary's subject is that Baker has two equally fascinating faces: there's the face of the young Baker, radiating with unearthly beauty, captured in archival television footage and his appearances in glamorous postwar Italian films, and there's also the sunken, haggard face of the elder Baker, a man in his fifties who looks like he's in his seventies, lavished upon with close attention by cinematographer Jeff Preiss' intimate camera. Although the film presents us with various people who tell their various Chet Baker stories, its main engine is entirely powered by the tension generated by toggling between footage of these two faces for two hours. Along the way we wonder at peculiar questions: how should we feel about the wreckage of this beautiful figure? how should we feel when we learn that the man with the angelic face may have been a cruel, careless person? how should we feel when we learn that the man with the ruined face still possesses mesmerizing talent and charisma? These aren't new questions—in fact they feel like they have a timeless quality—but this film re-sensitizes you to these basic human enigmas, and this is indeed its great merit.

A ★★★★ review of Let's Get Lost (1988)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can make a whole movie out of nothing more than a director's fascination with a particular face. This probably goes double when your director is a fashion photographer like our director here, Bruce Weber—someone for whom "the way people look" is already an overriding concern. And the genius of Weber choosing jazz luminary Chet Baker as his documentary's subject is that Baker has two equally fascinating faces: there's the face of the young Baker, radiating with unearthly beauty, captured in archival television footage and his appearances in glamorous postwar Italian

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