It has become a cliche of documentary film-making that a project which sets out to capture people's differences will only end up emphasising how alike we all are. How many times must a western crew have voyaged up the Amazon, hoping to capture footage of an undiscovered tribe who ritually sacrifice their first-born to the monkey god, only to find a bunch of loggers crowded around a TV set, beers in hand, yelling at Robinho to pull his finger out?
When Argentinean-American director Luciano Blotta first travelled to Jamaica seven years ago, he came up with the idea of making a documentary about the local underground music scene. This would be a thorny proposition for any outsider; even more so for a film-maker who admits that before touching down in Kingston, the only reggae artist he could name was Bob Marley.
Blotta's blissful ignorance meant he was never likely to get close to the real essence of what makes Jamaican pop so vibrant and distinct. Instead, his film Rise Up Reggae Star – following three wannabe reggae stars labouring under varying degrees of delusion about their potential to make it big – only serves to reiterate that, in any country, cracking it is as much about savvy and contacts as it is about raw talent.
Rise Up's three subjects are archetypes, recognisable from Trenchtown to Camden. Turbulence, a Rastafarian singer, whose brand of rootsy dancehall seems somewhat generic. He's been hammering the local dances for years, and even toured Europe with Sizzla, without getting the breakthrough he feels he deserves.
Ice Anastacia is the obnoxious uptown kid with the ludicrous ghetto poses, whose posse are too busy leeching off his parents' credit cards to tell him he sucks. For Ice, read Victoria Aitken, Flash Louis or any hateful celebrity/toff offspring who's mumbled vacuously about starting a band.
Thirdly, there's Kemoy, the painfully innocent farmgirl with the voice of an angel who in the UK would be chewed up and spat out by The X Factor machine.
Depressingly, it looks for a while like Ice – who's able to buy face time with competent producers – is the likeliest of the three to achieve his dream of fame. Instead, it's Turbulence who has a eureka moment: switching his producers, venturing into a more aggressive MCing style, and scoring a genuine worldwide hit with the thrilling Notorious.
So Rise Up gets its happy ending. But do we learn anything about Jamaican music? Not really. The elephant (man) in the room throughout the documentary is dancehall, the lewd, crude and sonically fierce sound of young Jamaica that Rise Up – save for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene of a "ghetto sting" – roundly ignores. Suffice to say, those few seconds are more exciting than most of the rest of the film put together.
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