Elis & Tom: só tinha de ser com você (It had to be you)
Directed by Jom Tob Azulay and Roberto de Oliveira
Written by Nelson Motta and Roberto de Oliveira
Unrated
Runtime: 100 minutes
Streaming on Amazon February 6

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

In 1974, Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim–one of the great bossa nova musicians of all time–and Elis Regina–Brazil’s most popular vocalist in her day–joined forces in a Los Angeles recording studio, essentially a ten-year testimonial gift from Regina’s record label. The album they made, Elis & Tom, is a bossa nova masterpiece, and many Brazilians consider the album among the greatest ever made.

I didn’t know any of this coming into watching Elis & Tom. My bossa nova knowledge doesn’t extend much further than that one West Wing scene with Emily Procter and what makes Kyle Gordon’s “The Ugliest Girl on the Beach” a fun pastiche. So while it suffers a bit for its structure, I’m thankful for Elis & Tom: só tinha de ser com você (It had to be you) which unearths 16mm footage from the album recording (back when LA was mostly smog and you could smoke indoors basically anywhere), restores it to 4K, and gives a glimpse of two artists coming together to make a great album.

The film works when it’s tracking the two artists’ paths to, and their time in, the studio. Co-directors Jom Tob Azulay and Roberto de Oliveira (the latter a co-writer of the film) show us Jobim’s splash in the US market as bossa nova began its boom in the ‘60s, performing with Frank Sinatra and jazz great Ron Carter. In some ways, he hit it big in the US and then came back to Brazil. We see Regina’s globe-trotting career and her versatility as a vocalist and get a sense of the perils of an international career in Brazil — the long flights to go on tour; the sneering from Brazilians essentially seeing them as sellouts; and after a 1964 coup, the repressive military dictatorship lasting over twenty years. Jobim and Regina had never worked together before: neither was a great fan of the other’s music, and the film shows the two as aesthetic opposites.

The moments where we see the exuberant Regina and the cool Jobim, the maximalist and the minimalist, cobble together a working style for the record are when Elis & Tom is at its best. The moments when we see Elis and Tom bridging the gaps in their styles and in their artistic principles to make the album — and in turn develop a personal bond — is a sight (and sound) to behold. There is frustration and doubt, particularly on Regina’s end toward Jobim’s production choices, but there is also joy — of the two principals, their band, their crew (including Grammy Award winner Humberto Gatica on his first solo engineering gig), and their families. Especially knowing Elis’s tragic end, dead from cardiac arrest and a likely suicidal overdose at just 36 years old, seeing her talent and her (at least outward) happiness is touching.

And yet, for a film all about bossa nova, there just isn’t a clear rhythm. Azulay, de Oliveira, and co-writer Nelson Motta employ a non-chronological approach here that takes away from some of the emotional heft and leads to some transitions not making any sense. We jump from 1974, to the 1960s, to the 1980s, to the present day, all without a clear throughline. Some scenes lead to the archival footage getting doubled up, such as seeing Elis and Tom’s first meeting at LAX and then, another 40 minutes later, seeing it again, but with a few more seconds of footage stitched in. What’s more, neither the before nor the after gives a context for their careers or Brazil at the time. For example, there’s a brief mention of the Army Olympics, at which Elis performed, but there’s no clarity as to when it occurred and the viewer has to connect the dots to recognize the junta in charge of the country at the time. The multitude of talking heads from band-members and producers doesn’t help either. While the perspective of Elis and Tom’s adult children is helpful, the rest of the contemporary scenes just come off like the worst kind of music doc: a bunch of old dudes patting themselves on the back for lifting up — or maybe just lifting — someone else’s talent.

The film just can’t sit still for a moment and really recognize what a treasure its titular characters were and are. Maybe a Peter Jackson, The Beatles: Get Back approach (keep the focus solely on the archival footage) may have been better — but maybe the old 16mm shots, with some other footage from the time, couldn’t be strung together for a full feature. But I think a tighter, shorter film may have served the legacy of these artists better than a 100-minute-long, ping-ponging journey through their careers.