Dollar Mambo

I saw "Dollar Mambo" again last night, during a cultural act in the open air, by the coast of Panama Bay, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the American invasion of Panamá on December 20, 1989, in which thousands of innocent persons were killed. The first time I saw the movie I rejected it, for I expected a naturalist treatise about the invasion, and was confronted by a figurative motion picture, in which Mexican artist Paul Leduc gave his personal impression of the events, Panamá and its people. Last night I re-discovered "Dollar Mambo", and found it a very good motion picture, so I write this to retract myself. After "Frida, naturaleza viva", director Leduc followed his own aesthetic path of fluid camera movements, almost no dialogues and post-modern, fragmented story lines. First he made "¿Cómo ves?", a controversial docudrama about marginal life in México City, in which music played a central role, so it did not come as a surprise when he decided to make a musical trilogy. First he adapted Alejo Carpentier's short novel "Concierto barroco" into "Barroco" (1989), he followed it with a new remake of the novel by Federico Gamboa "Santa", this time called "Latino Bar" (1991), and finally he ended the trilogy with this musical "a la Leduc", based on a real event during the American invasion and posterior occupation of Panamá for months. Leduc adapted news he read in the papers, about a woman who was killed in a Panamanian bar by American soldiers who were acquited after detention for a while, as if nothing (the same response given by American authorities to the claims of the victims' relatives). He wrote the screenplay with the collaboration of many artists, including Panamanain poet Pedro Rivera, and came out with this strong metaphor of oppression, genocide, transculturation and death, to the sound of Afro-Caribbean rhythms, mambos by Dámaso Pérez Prado and a touch of rock and roll: the story follows the romance of a black dancer (Dolores Pedro), and her lover (Roberto Sosa), when suddenly bombs and bodies start to fall, and she is forced to degrade herself having sex with several American soldiers, in front of her beaten boyfriend. A very simple story turned into a tense, dramatic film, definitely not for all tastes, it is true, because of its many musical metaphors and symbols, in the midst of angry visual statements against American imperialism. But a quiet observation of the film and probably a conversation after its projection would reveal many missing interpretations and readings that we may lose on the first sight (as it happened to me). After "Dollar Mambo", Leduc retired from feature films for a while, and made several digital animation shorts on music appreciation.

Leduc's career as a director seems to consist of expressing left-wing South American political commentary through an eclectic mixture of musical styles; a bona-fide film 'artist' as opposed to an auteur or even an avowed celluloid storyteller. This non-narrative retrospective response to the 80s American occupation of Panama is no exception to the rule.

However, there is nothing particularly didactic in its combination of documentary footage and the director's trademark wordless staged 'action', largely confined to an intentionally artificial local nightclub and set to its insuppressible mambo rhythm; which ultimately results in the sort of alienating subjective experience one encounters when coerced into attending a modern art exhibition.

The combination of its vague love-triangle 'plot' juxtaposed with rumba, rumbles and rumpy-pumpy may however reward the more imaginative cineaste with a gamut of references from the cinematically-expressed anti-U.S. manifesto of 'Medium Cool' to the externalised physical choreography of knife-edge emotion in 'West Side Story'; and given the subject matter, the opportunity to compare and contrast with such left-of-centre mainstream examples of American cinema may therefore not be unfavourable.

By turns fascinating and dull, this utterly bizarre anti-imperialist musical seems formless at first but turns out to be a pointed surrealist commentary on the U.S. invasion of Panama.

With no dialog besides a peculiar bookend scene of a ventriloquist, the movie alternates between dance numbers and silent vignettes of people going on about their lives. As the movie moves along there is an increasing sense of danger as the movie's politics come to the fore. This is all interesting but the vignettes are generally dull, although the dancing is pretty interesting. The high point of the film is the final extended dance sequence, a brief dramatic piece of dance that becomes increasingly ominous. This sequence is compelling but also rather upsetting, and is the main reason I wouldn't encourage my dance-crazy but squeamish girlfriend to watch it.

I didn't love this, but it is unique and worth taking a look at.