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    Ricardo Arjona, Prolific Latin Pop Star, Says He Will Stop Touring

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    The Guatemalan singer-songwriter said that his latest performance in Chile would be his last after struggling with back issues that made it difficult to stand and perform.Ricardo Arjona, the Guatemalan singer and songwriter known for dozens of Latin pop ballads that became international hits over a career that spanned more than 30 years, said he would stop touring, citing back problems and an imminent surgery.Arjona, 59, wrote in social media posts on Sunday that he would stop performing on his “Blanco y Negro” tour after a show in Santiago, Chile, though his statement fell short of announcing a retirement.“I’ll have to disappear to invent a reason that’s bigger than this,” he wrote in Spanish. “If I can’t find it, I prefer not to return.”Arjona said he had received “six spinal infiltrations,” also known as epidural injections, over the past two months to be able to stand during his concerts, and to delay surgery. Before he performed on Saturday, Arjona said he wasn’t sure if he would be able to take a step. His “Blanco y Negro” tour, which began last year in Buenos Aires, included dozens of shows, with several stops in Mexico, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The North American leg of the tour this year included stops at Madison Square Garden in New York, as well as dozens of other cities across the United States.“I came from dear Argentina, which gave me songs in the street and gave me a glory that I did not deserve,” he said. “I say goodbye in this Chile of so many stories and affections.”The tour highlighted two of his albums: “Blanco,” which was released in 2020, and “Negro,” which came out in 2021. Over the course of a career that has spanned more than 30 years, Arjona has produced more than a dozen studio albums, which have earned him several awards and accolades, including the Billboard Latin music lifetime achievement award in 2017.In 2006, Arjona won a Grammy Award for best Latin pop album and the Latin Grammy Award for best male pop vocal album for his album “Adentro.” As of December, Arjona’s music was drawing more than 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify.Arjona began his musical career in the 1980s, and after his music didn’t initially attract many listeners, he briefly taught at a public school, he said in an interview in 2011. He returned to music, and his career took off in the 1990s, when he released songs like “Historia de Taxi,” the tale of a taxi driver’s love affair. The song remains one of his most popular hits to date, having been played more than 158 million times on Spotify. Multiple other hits followed and ranked him on the top Latin music charts for his signature songs of romantic lyrics and inventive storytelling.“Life and people have been immensely generous to this Guatemalan,” he wrote on social media, adding, “a public-school teacher, who by playing the guitar, adding some words and trying a melody, achieved a miracle that I never suspected.” More

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      36 Hours in Santiago, Chile: Things to Do and See

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      10 a.m.
      Hike a city-center hill
      Clear a sore head with a sharp ascent up Cerro San Cristóbal, a green islet of native trees and plants in the city center. At 10 a.m., the cable car opens, getting you to the top in under 10 minutes (a hop-on, hop-off day ticket costs 7,900 pesos and includes the funicular railway and shuttle buses within the 1,821-acre Parque Metropolitana). If you’d rather do the hour-long hike, start at the Pedro de Valdivia Norte entrance. As you climb, enjoy panoramic views of the city and mountains, incongruously punctured by the 980-foot, needle-like Gran Torre Santiago, South America’s tallest building. Your reward at the summit is a mote con huesillo (around 2,500 pesos), a refreshing, sweet juice containing a rehydrated peach and a handful of corn, available from the many stands at Estación Cumbre. To descend, take the funicular down the far side, leaving you in Bellavista — and just a block from La Chascona, the poet Pablo Neruda’s quirky home. More

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      ‘Chile ’76’ Review: Domestic Unease That Twists Into Intrigue

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      Manuela Martelli’s new film examines the Pinochet dictatorship through the eyes of a woman who never intended to play an active role.In 1973, the socialist government of Chile was overthrown by a military junta led by Gen‌‌. Augusto Pinochet, with the backing of the United States. Thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands fled the country under Pinochet’s dictatorship, which lasted for 17 years and was maintained through violence. ‌With the new film “Chile ’76,” the director Manuela Martelli joins the company of Chilean filmmakers like Pablo Larraín and Sebastián Leilo, who have made thought-provoking movies reflecting on the Pinochet regime and its impact on the lives of everyday people. Martelli’s initial inspiration for the story came from a source close to home. She imagined the loss felt by her grandmother, who died by suicide in 1976, one of the most violent years of the dictatorship, before Martelli was born.The protagonist of “Chile ’76” is Carmen (Aline Küppenheim), a regal woman of middle age. She’s a grandmother and a career flight attendant who now lives a comfortably bourgeois lifestyle with her husband in Santiago. When the story begins, she’s in the process of overseeing renovations to her family’s beachside vacation home. Carmen occupies her time alone with charitable work, guided by the sanguine priest of the town, Father Sánchez (Hugo Medina).Carmen is discomforted by the sanctioned brutality around her — early on, she witnesses distraught neighbors being dragged away in the streets. But Carmen’s comfortable existence is not directly disrupted until Father Sánchez asks her to care for a fugitive hidden in the church. She acquiesces, nursing Elías (Nicolás Sepúlveda), a wounded revolutionary, back to health. She transports antibiotics for his injuries, and lies to the suspicious authorities to cover her tracks. Anxiety becomes Carmen’s constant companion as telephones buzz on lines that might be tapped, and neighbors pry, posing inconvenient questions.Martelli’s film demonstrates remarkable skill in reconstructing he time period, giving consideration both to recreating the appearance of the era and its emotional tenor. She filmed in beach towns that have remained relatively unaltered since the ’70s, and she complements the look of crumbling building facades with wood-paneled interior sets. It’s a world that’s both worn and warm; even the wallpaper comes in cozy plaid.Yet Martelli’s detailed, beautiful frames aren’t signs of empty aestheticism. Her eye for composition mirrors that of her protagonist, a person of elegant tastes who is drawn into a political plot that intrudes upon her capacity to redesign. The film’s original score blends electronic and orchestral music, and acts as an indicator of Carmen’s justified paranoia, entering in moments when her routines are most disturbed. As an entrant into the growing canon of Chilean films responding to the Pinochet dictatorship, “Chile ’76” is a sly genre exercise, an example of how political repression can squeeze a domestic melodrama until it takes the shape of a spy thriller.Chile ’76Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Imaginary Country’ Review: Chile in Revolt

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      Patricio Guzmán, Chile’s cinematic conscience, chronicles the uprising that shook the country starting in 2019.The most powerful images in “My Imaginary Country” are of the demonstrations in the streets of Santiago, Chile, that began in October 2019. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans took to the streets, at first to protest a subway fare increase, and eventually to demand sweeping changes to the nation’s economic and political order. They were met with tear gas, baton charges and plastic bullets aimed at their eyes. Some fought back with cobblestones chiseled from the street, which they hurled at the police.To watch scenes like that in a documentary film — or, for that matter, on social media — is to experience a strong sense of déjà vu. What happened in Santiago in 2019 and 2020 feels like an echo of similar uprisings around the world; in Tehran in 2009 (and again this week); in Arab capitals like Tunis, Damascus and Cairo in 2011; in Kyiv in 2014; in Paris at the height of the Yellow Vest movement in 2018. Those episodes aren’t identical, but each represents the eruption of long-simmering dissatisfaction with a status quo that seems stubbornly indifferent to the grievances of the people.Accompanying the exhilaration that these pictures might bring is a sense of foreboding. In almost every case, these rebellions ended in defeat, disappointment, stalemate or worse. The buoyant democratic promise of Tahrir Square in Cairo has been smothered by a decade of military dictatorship. Ukrainian democracy, seemingly victorious after the Maidan “revolution of dignity,” has since faced internal and external threats, most recently from Vladimir Putin’s army.Jehane Noujaim’s “The Square” and Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Winter on Fire” are excellent in-the-moment films about Tahrir and Maidan, and “My Imaginary Country” belongs in their company. But it also has a resonance specific to Chile, and to the career of its director, Patricio Guzmán, who brings a unique and powerful historical perspective to his country’s present circumstances. He has seen events like this before, and has reason to hope that this time might be different.Guzman, now in his early 80s, can fairly be described as Chile’s biographer, and also its cinematic conscience. His first documentary, footage from which appears in this one, was about the early months of Salvador Allende’s presidency, which began in an atmosphere of optimism and defiance in 1970 and ended in a brutal U.S.-supported military coup three years later. Guzman’s account of Allende’s fall and the repression that followed is the three-part “Battle of Chile,” which he completed while exiled in France, and which stands as one of the great political films of the past half-century.More recently, in another trilogy— “Nostalgia For the Light,” “The Pearl Button” and “Cordillera of Dreams” — Guzman has explored Chile’s distinct cultural and geographical identity, musing on the intersections of ecology, demography and politics in a mode that is lyrical and essayistic. In “My Imaginary Country” he cites the French filmmaker Chris Marker as a mentor, and they share a spirit of critical humanism and a habit of looking for the meaning of history in the fine grain of experience.While this is a first-person documentary, with the director providing voice-over narration, it expresses a poignant humility and a patient willingness to listen. Guzman interweaves footage of the demonstrations into interviews with participants, most of them young and all of them women.This revolution, which culminated in the election of Gabriel Boric, a leftist in his 30s, to Chile’s presidency and a referendum calling for a new constitution, arose out of the economic frustrations of students and working people. But Guzman and the activists, scholars and journalists he talks to make clear that feminism was always central to the movement. They argue that the plight of poor and Indigenous Chileans can’t be understood or addressed without taking gender into account, and that the equality of women is foundational to any egalitarian politics.“My Imaginary Country” ends with a new constituent assembly — including many veterans of the demonstrations — meeting to write a new constitution that they hope will finally dispel the legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s long dictatorship. After the film was completed, voters rejected their first draft, a setback to Boric and to the radical energy Guzman’s film captures and celebrates. Whatever the next chapter will be, we can hope that he is around to record it.My Imaginary CountryNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More