User Reviews

Delightful Belgian comedy in the vein of Jacques Tati. Dominique and Fiona (both played by the directors of the same name) are a married couple who both teach in a rural elementary school. Their hobby is dancing the rumba, and they've won many awards for doing so. Unfortunately, after one competition, the two get in a car accident that claims the wife's leg and the husband's mind. Far from being sentimental, this film plays pretty much everything for comedy and is really just a handful of comic setpieces strung together. Like Tati and the silent comedians who influenced him, some of the comic moments seem forced, but they're all amusing. There are three dance sequences, the first two of which are completely awesome (not to demean the third). Abel and Gordon are tall, gangly people and their dances are truly unique and a wonder to behold. The film also has a wonderful, candy-colored palette and a playful sense of artificiality (like really obvious sets and the use of rear projection). The only real problem is that it, being mostly just a collection of sketches, the story is pretty thin and the resolution is a tad disappointing (despite Fiona's one leg, I was hoping for one final, real dance).

Like their earlier, even better 'L'Iceberg', this is an inventive throwback to silent films and physical comedies, directed, written and chiefly performed by a talented trio of circus trained clowns.

Complete with their trademark minimal dialogue and dark events that never keep the film from being light and funny ( the two main characters are in a car crash near the start; one loses a leg, the other his memory, but somehow it works being played for laughs).

This didn't work quite as well as 'L'Iceberg' for me – that had a more interesting, surreal plot to hang their routines on, and more of their bits rose to the level of truly inspired, but this is still a sweet, funny, good-hearted film that cheerfully refuses to play by modern rules.

Here we have the story of a heartwarming unconventional couple with the great plan in head to dance the Rumba. But the plan will be complicated after a car crash. Wow! What will sound like a boring drama is in fact a really absurd, charming and wild comedy which looks like Jaques Tati and Leon Schuster did a film together. Strange, strange, strange - and very likable, wild and surreal. But only the first half. The second half looks like somebody (the producers?) said: hey, folks, 40 minutes are not enough - let's stretch the stuff to feature length. And here the problems starts. Serious problems. Because the movie left the charming couple situation and goes to - at least to nowhere. This is a shame. Don't go to cinema, wait for the DVD-Release, watch the first half, have some great and charming entertainment - and spare the second half. Sometimes people should did short films and not more!

Some films begin with the vision of the story, followed by its shaping for the screen. If we are lucky, the match between the edges of the story (or whatever the artist has in mind) and the expression will be cinematic. The things that matter to me are usually in this form.

Others begin with a set of tools and resources. You have a rock star, or a collection of gee whiz effects, or franchise characters, and put together a project to exploit this asset. I still can appreciate these if the craft has art, or even competence. Often the vocabulary of cinema is advanced in these projects and exploited in the other kind. I can follow some filmmakers as they wander through these two modes, wonderful filmmakers.

This is the second case. We had a performer with a collection of effective tricks developed with her stage partner. She built a situation and story in order to use what she has. The woman in question is Fiona Gordon, a redheaded Australian. Perhaps six two high, gangly but busty, a physique that one would guess is unmanageable.

What she has done is master this body, move to Franch where there is stage tradition that supports physical humor. She finds a partner, a talented enough fellow. She fosters a persona of a woman who lives in a separate world, entirely separate except for two points where we can encounter each other: her body art of course, and her language which she uses almost not at all.

So the story here is of a woman who teaches English in a rural French school. We almost never hear her speak in French and any speaking is rare. She lives by either being fenced from reality or performing by dancing, where she is unfettered, joyful. She is a real pleasure to watch, a deliberately unsexy character expressing her sexuality. She enters a situation where both are denied to her. At the end, there is some, slight dear reward for her earnestness.

The fold: she is married to a man. His relationship to her is precisely the same as hers to the rest of the world, both in language and body expression. He is a physical education teacher in the same school. Where she has what we might call a mental impairment in real life, it seems natural in the world of the film, rendered in cartoonish oversaturated pastels and sparse sets. He lives in a world more removed, a step within the world of the movie.

The two have an encounter with a third character, someone who is determined to take everything from himself, and accidentally takes everything from them instead.

It woks, because though the story is built to give this woman a path to artistic expression, the story is about her character (also named Fiona) and her relationship to her artistic expression. You will not fall in love with her; you are not intended to. But you will fall in love with the unremitting quest for love and life.

There are cute dogs in several guises, also folded in the same way.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.