Review: Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

Writer/Director: Cosima Spender

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

You’d expect a biographical documentary about a living artist to be respectful, but this documentary about Italian singer Andrea Bocelli will leave you wondering why the Vatican is waiting so long to just go ahead and declare him a saint.

By all accounts, Bocelli is a decent guy who loves his wife and children, and it is certainly admirable that he overcame childhood blindness to become one of the world’s most recognizable voices. We already knew all that. But did you know Bocelli is also very down-to-earth?

You certainly will after experiencing Because I Believe. Between musical performance snippets, we get to meet the childhood friends who assure us Andrea has always been “very down-to-earth.” We encounter Italian pop singer Zucchero who also casually mentions Andrea is “very down-to-earth.” Likewise, the show biz promoter who discovered him playing in bars uses that experience to explain to us that Andrea is very down-to-earth. Even Andrea’s wife, who co-produced the film with Andrea, offers the novel insight that her husband is very down-to-earth.

When director Cosima Spender gets around to showing Andrea clopping across the Tuscan countryside on his favorite horse, you half expect the steed to turn to the camera and say, “Well, Wilbuuuuur, I can tell you that Andrea is very down-to-earth.”

Happily, between those somewhat repetitive personal testimonies, Because I Believe includes generous passages of Bocelli exercising his remarkable vocal instrument, from his breakthrough performance at the 1993 Sanremo Music Festival through a monumental concert at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla, a tribute to the historic Three Tenors concert held there in 1990.

There’s no denying the power of Bocelli’s voice, nor his pivotal role as an ambassador to the world on behalf of classical music. A few vintage clips of the great Luciano Pavarotti praising Bocelli is the film’s backhanded way of addressing his one great artistic frustration: a lifetime of bitter and often cruel rejection by the opera world establishment. Their dismissal is ironic: That bunch should thank the Operatic Gods that Bocelli has inspired two generations to give their highfalutin’ art form a chance.

Now that would be very down-to-earth of them.