RUMBA is now playing at the ROYAL THEATRE in TORONTO and opened to great reviews from the Toronto newspapers. Here's a selection of some of the reviews:
TORONTO STAR
RUMBA Film Review
Rumba: Light on its feet
January 16, 2009
JASON ANDERSON
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Rumba
(out of 4)
Starring and directed by Dominique Abel with Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy. 77 minutes. At the Royal Cinema. PG
A near-silent Belgian farce about a married pair of competitive Latin dancers whose lives go badly but amusingly awry, Rumba features plenty of fancy footwork.
The performance backgrounds of its trio of creators are much in evidence both in the sequences devoted to the titular dance style and the physical comedy work that results in some hilariously inventive gags worthy of Jacques Tati.
Rumba is the second feature by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, three performers who have worked together since the early 1990s. Though this marks their introduction to local audiences, the Australian-born Gordon was raised in Canada and earned a degree from the University of Windsor before studying in Paris, where she first met Abel.
Clowning is certainly their forté, though the story here is more than a little melancholy. Abel and Gordon play Dom and Fiona, schoolteachers in a provincial Belgian town who live for the chance to show off their dance-floor skills. Though long and gawky in shape, their bodies nonetheless display all the grace and passion that the rumba demands.
Alas, their latest triumph at a competition in a nearby town ends in tragedy when their car swerves to miss a suicidal man (Philippe Martz) standing in the middle of a country road. The accident leaves Fiona with only one leg and Dom with a rather inconsistent grasp of his mental faculties.
From this point proceeds all manner of silliness. Shorn of their former gracefulness, Dom and Fiona are doomed to endure one mishap after another. In Rumba's daffiest sequence, Fiona's decision to rid their home of dance trophies and other signs of past glories prompts a fiery cascade of destruction. That this series of catastrophes is briefly interrupted by Abel and Gordon's tender-hearted rendition of the song "Sea of Love" makes it all the more delirious.
Obviously, Rumba's brand of humour can seem as cruel as it does whimsical. And even though the running time is a mere 77 minutes, the storyline gets stretched mighty thin, with much of the later comic business failing to match the heights of inspired absurdity reached by the scenes in the film's middle third.
But any viewer with an enduring fondness for the precision-crafted buffoonery of the great silent comedians or for the expertly choreographed mayhem in Tati's films of the '50s and '60s will be quick to forgive Rumba for its slightness.
TORONTO SUN
RUMBA Film Review
Rumba pulls clever comic routines
By LIZ BRAUN, SUN MEDIA
Last Updated: 16th January 2009, 3:53am
Rumba is a bizarre little confection. The almost-silent movie concerns a loving couple whose life revolves around dancing. After a tragic car crash, the dancing is replaced by severed limbs, brain damage and a ruinous house fire.
Of course, it's a comedy.
Rumba is a series of sight gags created by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, the filmmakers and actors who also made L'Iceberg. You know you're entering weird turf from opening scenes in a classroom where the teacher (Fiona Gordon) has the students chanting nonsense. Her husband (Dominique Abel), the gym teacher, dances past her classroom window in a manic fashion, and before too long, they are at home doing what they love best: Dancing. Their house is full of dance trophies. Their world is all bright colours and childlike wonder, and their drive to yet another dance competition yields a typical comedy routine: changing clothes and putting on makeup and twisting their bodies like pretzels, while also driving the car. It's funny and clever and very silly.
Then they encounter a man too dense to handle his own suicide. His pathetic action leads to that car crash, to amnesia and to amputation, but the dance of comedy continues nonetheless. A particular moment in which Fiona tries to juggle her crutches and her briefcase, before falling out a window, is downright inspired.
Not every routine in Rumba works and some of the comedy bits lean toward boring, but for the most part, each segment is brisk and visually delightful. The unusual elements of the movie certainly never wear thin.
Shadow dances, stolen wheelchairs, a melted phone that won't stop ringing -- Rumba is a fantasy and a love story that never stops being hopeful and humorous. The few words of dialogue are in French, with English subtitles.
---
RUMBA
1 Hour, 17 Minutes
Starring: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy
Director: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy
Sun Rating: 3 out of 5
GLOBE AND MAIL
RUMBA Film Review
Love that perseveres, silent and sweet
RICK GROEN
From Friday's Globe and Mail
January 16, 2009 at 4:16 AM EST
RUMBA
• Directed, written by and starring Dominque Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy
• Classification: PG
If you've ever laughed at and revelled in the films of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd or Jacques Tati, then Rumba will seem a delightful blast from the silent past. And if you haven't, here's a 77-minute chance to see what all the fuss is about, to take a brief holiday from the frenetic cutting of today's pictures and slow down for the held shot, peer into a static frame and marvel at how subtle simplicity can be.
Because there's a lot going on here, from the comic to the poignant, from slapstick sight gags to touching tableaus, but it's all done with such light and deceptive ease. No, Rumba is not strictly a silent movie - a little dialogue is occasionally spoken, and the music on the soundtrack is danced to, even sung. Yet the methods - rear projection, stylized sets, the fixed lens - hail from that era. And so does the spirit, infusing a short story with the resonance of a fable, childlike but never childish.
The collaborators here are Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel and Bruno Romy, who, shooting in France, have teamed together both behind and in front of the camera. The moral of their fable isn't hard to find: It's about persevering through misfortune. However, like Chaplin's tramp, this is a very specific brand of perseverance, the kind that seems to flirt with stupidity and border on obliviousness, only to soar at the end to a whole other plane, elevating what's apparently silly into something pretty near profound.
The tale's starting point is bliss. Teachers at a primary school, Dom (Abel) and Fiona (Gordon) share a certain homeliness, a tidy bungalow, a passion for the rumba and a loving marriage - they are, in short, happy. And since words can't express that emotion, the film mainly makes do without them, choosing instead to capture the feeling through the steady gaze of an unmoving lens. Inside that frame, the details are often funny and always telling - the Day-Glo palette of their bizarre little house, or the obsessive eccentricities of their bedtime ritual, or, especially, the rapturous steps of their beloved dance.
Yes, marital bliss - then misfortune strikes. As the couple are driving home one dark night, happiness encounters depression in the middle of the road - a weepy and suicidal man (Romy) is beckoning death. They swerve hard, avoiding him but smashing up the car. The crash is only heard offscreen, yet, in the hospital afterward, the consequences are clearly visible: She has lost her leg, he has lost his memory. However, neither seems remotely perturbed. After all, they still have their bungalow - until it burns down. They still have their past - until he can't remember it. And they still have each other - until fate separates them.
With the devastation mounting, the losses are cruel but not the comedy that depicts them. As a loose thread gets caught on Fiona's red dress, we're given permission to laugh at her literally unravelling life. And if a few of the sight gags go on too long, be patient, because, even in the midst of an existence turned tragically bleak, there are surprising pockets of beauty. Like the tableau that positions the two of them, she in a wheelchair and he beside her, immobilized before a snow-white wall - then, while they remain still, their shadows detach themselves and, silhouetted against the blank canvas, get up to do dance, dance, dance. It's a gorgeous effect, truly uplifting.
When everything dwindles to nothing, surely love gets as lost as the lovers, and happiness is gone. But weirdly, wonderfully, it isn't - or, least, the capacity for it isn't. The limbless and the mindless endure, as imperturbable as ever. And maybe, just maybe, they come to prevail.
Posts
