Rumba

Dom and Fiona, an adorable, if slightly nitwitted, married couple share a simple life as teachers in a rural French school. He teaches physical education and she teaches English. They have a sweet little house.

But they live to dance the Rumba! They have a mantle full of trophies to prove it. One evening, driving home from a dance contest with yet another cup, they crash their car trying to avoid a man trying to commit suicide. They end up in the hospital, she with a leg amputated at the knee and he with an inability to remember anything, including who Fiona is. Complications ensue.

If this seems like a strange set-up for a comedy, you have to realize that this comes from a very different comic tradition than American. That tradition is the films of Jacques Tati. The camera is immobile and the action moves in and out of the frame. The sets and scenery are iconic -- some cows in the frame show we are out of the town and in the countryside, etc. None of the comedy in this movie is gross, sexual, satirical or sarcastic. It is good-natured through and through.

As with Tati, we are treated to elaborately choreographed pratfalls and sight gags. In one scene, Fiona returns to her classroom on crutches and tries to put down her briefcase, but it gets entangled in her crutch and she keeps losing her balance while flailing wildly. You might not see a scene mocking a cripple like this played for fun in PC America. Again like Tati, this is close to being a silent movie, although there is some dialogue.

The highlights of the movie, though, are two absolutely enchanting fantasy dance sequences. In one, they are sitting together glumly on a street, she in her wheelchair, and their shadows begin to dance on the wall behind them. The other is on the surface of the foggy ocean.

If this movie does not put a smile on your face, you're made of stone.

A half baked movie. The original idea is excellent, the realization falls almost flat. Almost, because not everything is lost, it has some enjoyable moments among a lot of forgivable ones; moments, you know..., when you feel the embarrassment the other person should feel?

The main couple are not candidates for a beauty contest (but after seeing "Precious", I suppose that has nothing to do with the excellency of a movie); she has a receding chin; his face looks like he didn't sleep for the last six months.

I don't know how to put it with my execrable English..., the movie is BAD, but extremely enjoyable.

It's obvious they did it with a tiny budget, so, maybe that has something to do with the final product. But what really grabbed me was the soundtrack: A few gorgeous Cuban boleros that blast one's mind with delight! with lyrics that don't make much sense if one analyzes them, but that are so romantic and enjoyable as to have one repeat and repeat the moments when they are being played.

The color photography is charming, since the hues are very saturated, giving a childlike effect of a kindergarten. The deja vu feeling of watching an early Almodovar movie is very strong!! The choreography is basic, almost amateurish, and they both dance with gusto, but let's assume they didn't pretend to be the next Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth... Oh, Fred and Rita...where are you now!!??

This is a very simple, heart-warming film. It's in Tati's vein of flat onedimensionality, which has roots in vaudeville and silent comedy. How this works is that we are placed at a larger viewing distance than usual. We know hardly anything about the protagonists, they are in love and love to dance basically. There is sparse dialogue, we won't know them by what they explain. There's rear projection in the driving scenes, a throwback to the artifice of old films, establishing a stage, a cartoonish-reduction, normally I find this off-putting.

But thankfully it is to very powerful effect. Overall the idea is to abstract to a canvas as blank as possible, sparse, a stage with just the people, so that instead of arguing with specific drama, we can register with unusual clarity simply the flow of feelings. It's emptying out.

Externally, that is their dance together. They're marvellous together, she a gangly Olive Oyl, he a gangly Mr. Hulot. It's not polished talent (deliberately so) like you might see in a normal dance film, but spontaneous joy, purely the desire to express feelings, shucks about form. It's a flawed dance, much better this way.

It's the internal flow that really elevates this though. It's as rich on the inside as it is plain on the outside. As silly or slight as some of the visual gags are, as visually unoriginal the flatness of stage, the lack of depth in the characters, so deep is the human connection between them. I was beaming with joy in the end.

Life can be trivial but happy, the film says. There is loss ahead, inserted as just the urge for death in the suicidal man. The loss as loss of memory as the burning down of the house, the man simply can't remember that he ever loved the love of his life. It's sweet and touching.

It's nearly transcendent by the end, a series of visual meditations on losing and finding again. The appeal? The larger viewing distance is not so that we can observe with distant cleverness, as in most Wes Anderson. Neither is it to 'ignore' the drama. It's so we can have enough empty space to unfold whole flows, without having the mind 'stop' at each turn. (someone like Bergman 'stops' the mind when he has you dwell in this or that psychological state)

So in this way, the film shows very clearly what causes suffering. It is what the film leaves out, that is dwelling with attachment on the particulars of misfortune. On the flipside of that is love as the dancing flow that liberates and redeems. This is simple, deep, a film to cherish.

Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy create this heartfelt little film called 'Rumba'. Abel and Gordon also play the key characters while Romy plays a petty thief. Made on a modest budget, 'Rumba' has a neat look. It almost feels as though one is watching a happy play at a theatre. Most of the scenes were done in single frame and the colourful sets and dance are immensely appealing. I found the shadow dance particularly beautiful.

This is almost a silent movie (with a few dialogue). Yet, the actors don't struggle at all in communicating through it. Abel and Gordon are brilliant. Their unique sense of humour is different from what one has witnessed in the usual comedy. It's mostly physical (slapstick) and satirical to an extent. Their character's passion for rumba and life and their love for one another is a delight to watch.

'Rumba' is an uplifting film and it is perhaps almost unlike anything one has seen of this genre. I found it by surprise and am glad that I did.

This is not the end-to-end dance movie I expected, but a rather dark comedy about a French couple whose passion is Latin dancing. There are some dance scenes in it, and they're very enjoyable, but there are long stretches with no dancing at all. Yet in another sense the entire movie seems like an extended dance.

It's in French with subtitles. But not too doggone many subtitles, because long stretches of the movie are told visually, without any dialogue at all. This is one of the movie's charms. Parts of the movie are very charming indeed; other stretches become a bit tiresome; much of it has a cartoonish aspect, even though it's all live-action rather than animation; and all of it is quirky as hell and mostly unpredictable.

All in all: I'm at a loss as to how to rate this peculiar film. I guess six or seven stars, something like that.