Film: Rumba
Release date: 12th April 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 74 mins
Director: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon & Bruno Romy
Starring: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Philippe Martz, Bruno Romy
Genre: Comedy
Studio: Network
Format: DVD
Country: France/Belgium
Co-directors and stars once again bring together their impressive dancing skills and penchant for slapstick in this homage to silent-movie comedy and dance movies of the 1950s.
Fiona and Dom, a happily-married couple in their forties, who teach young children at a suburban school, live for Latin American dancing. On their way home from winning another trophy for their dancing skills at a local dance competition, Dom has to swerve his car to avoid a burly man, Gerard, trying to commit suicide by standing in the middle of a country road. The car crashes into a wall, and Gerard leaves the scene.
Dom and Fiona wake up in hospital – Dom has short-term memory loss and can’t remember Fiona being his wife, though he’s happy to accept this is the case, and Fiona has lost the lower part of one of her legs from the knee down.
Being naturally – or perhaps unnaturally - forbearing and optimistic people, Dom and Fiona swiftly return to work at the junior school with a smile and cheerful demeanour, but their disabilities soon cause problems, and the head of the school gives them disability leave.
Fiona creates a bonfire in the garden of their home, throwing on all the dancing trophies they have collected as a form of burying the past and moving on with their lives, but the bonfire gets out of control and finally burns their house to ashes.
After an uncomfortable night sleeping in the rain in the ruins of their former home, Dom heads off to buy chocolate croissants for him and Fiona. However, his short-term memory loss causes him to forget his way home and he ends up on a bus going towards the coast, where he encounters Gerard once again...
Rumba is a bright film about a dark subject. The first ten minutes or so of the film, leading up to the car accident, could easily have been a short film in its own right, beginning with a wonderful dance sequence by the principle leads Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. Everything plays out in a consciously ‘50s Hollywood’ way, with the sets painted in bright primary colours, and consciously-artificial back projection used during the driving sequences, as the happy couple make their way frenetically to the dance contest. The two cinematic forms that Rumba adopts wholeheartedly are those of the dance movie (particularly those of the ‘50s and early-60s) and silent-film comedy or slapstick, and the leads are excellent at both.
However, this kind of chaotic and virtually-silent style is hard to engage with on an emotional level through the length of a modern feature film – which, at a short running time of around seventy minutes, the makers of the film seem to understand. However, even this short time-frame gets a little wearing, despite Abel and Gordon’s clear talents for dance and physical comedy acting.
The decision to bring disability into the story is a brave one – it’s a dark and unexpected turn of events, after the sunny opening, when Fiona is lying in hospital minus the lower half of her leg. This is a pivotal point where the film could turn in one of two directions – to either become more of a realistic drama about how the pair face this new situation, or to carry on in its comic-slapstick tone.
The filmmakers (principle leads Abel and Gordon co-directing with Bruno Romy) perhaps make the right choice in keeping with the Jacques Demy-meets-Jacques Tati tone they have established, but their desire to keep the audience amused, and to keep Dom and Fiona as two-dimensional comic creations after this disaster has struck, can sometimes seem more callous than amusing. A good example of this problem is the scene where Dom and Fiona make a bonfire of their dancing trophies and gently take turns to sing verses of the romantic pop song ‘Sea Of Love’ to one another, accompanied by Dom’s guitar. Halfway through this moment of calm and affection, Fiona’s wooden leg catches the edge of the bonfire and her wooden leg slowly takes flame, unnoticed by her or Dom, as they continue to sing to one another; it’s meant to be funny but it’s arguably a little cruel – could they not have been given three minutes of intimacy and happiness without some new joke at their expense? Also, as the couple are shot from behind once the point that the encroaching new disaster becomes visible, it also feels a little voyeuristic.
The film gets its feet back, so to speak, in the last fifteen minutes, where Fiona and Dom’s inevitable reunion is delayed by a series of quirks of fate, which conspire against their spotting one another at the beach, even though they are within centimetres of one another, but it’s not quite enough to dispel the sense that the film needed a stronger director and better script to make it the kind of cult classic it aspires to be.
As a showcase for the clear talents of Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel as dancers and physical comedians, Rumba does a good job, but doesn’t quite work as a feature film, and being a little too dark for youngsters and a little too lightweight for grown-ups, it’s hard to see what kind of audience this film is intended for. JC
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