"RUMBA" PLAYS AT BYTOWNE CINEMA OTTAWA FROM FEB.13-19

The award-winning comedic dance film RUMBA plays at the Bytowne Cinema Ottawa this week (playing exclusively from Feb.13-19/09). Check out the review in the Ottawa Citizen by Jay Stone:

A surreal dance with colourful, quiet clowns

Rumba spans weirdness and genius

By Jay Stone, The Ottawa Citizen
February 13, 2009

Would le voleur de pain au chocolate pilfer a fresh, cheese-stuffed baguette, as well? For the sake of Fiona and Dom’s lunch, one hopes not.

Rumba ***

Starring: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy

Directed by: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy

Rating: PG (mature theme) (In French with English subtitles)

Playing at: ByTowne Cinema, through Feb. 19

- - -

And then there's Rumba, a surreal oddity that is, among other things, brightly coloured, limber, inspired, tedious, whimsical, almost silent, ingenious, and 77 minutes long. Its stars, Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, are similarly eccentric: long-limbed, long-jawed, elastic, deadpan.

Near the beginning of the movie they do a dance -- he wearing red jogging pants and blue T-shirt, she in a yellow dress -- that is all elbows and knees, a gawky hula. It reminds you of two strands of spaghetti boiling, which is funny because later there's a scene where Dom and Fiona (for so their characters are called) are eating spaghetti, one long strand that ends with a kiss, just like the dogs in Lady and the Tramp.

Where to start with this one? She's an English teacher somewhere in Belgium, apparently (opening lesson: she has her students chanting "Around and around his ration of rice my dog rowdily runs") and he's a gym teacher in the same school, whom we see outside her window, leading his students in a nerdy run, arms waving.

Then they do the dance. Then they go off to a rumba competition, getting dressed in the car -- for a while, he's bent backwards over the front seat, trying to get his socks off -- then on the way home they try to avoid a guy who's about to commit suicide -- he keeps running between the road and the train tracks, just missing the various vehicles -- and crash their car. Dom wakes up with amnesia and Fiona wakes up with one leg missing.

And so on, I suppose. Rumba is an eccentric series of comic inventions that belongs in a genre of its own. Abel and Gordon and Bruno Romy (he has a small role as a man trying to steal a chocolate croissant) have an idiosyncratic style that combines the stylized set design of a M. Hulot comedy with the wordless clowning of silent cinema -- there is very little dialogue in Rumba -- and then runs it through the colour saturation machine so that it comes out looking like, oh, maybe Picasso's Crayolas. After somebody left them on the radiator.

Not all of it works: a sequence where Fiona, a new amputee, can't juggle her crutches with her notebook and her purse without falling out a window seems to be pushing the border of the film's essential sweetness, although admittedly, an earlier sequence, when her wooden leg catches fire, does set you up for it. The gags within gags -- Dom making an amnesiac's omelette, say, continuously breaking three eggs because he can't recall having just broken three -- are little moments of genius, as is the part where he unravels her dress while walking down the street, entrapping the whole neighbourhood, who remain serenely deadpan throughout. I supposed you would, if you lived near Dom and Fiona.