That’s dancing in the flat country… which is mine!
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Small UFO in the current cinematographic landscape, Rumba will charm the cinema lovers with its old-fashioned burlesque form! By reapropriating themselves the codes of this genre, Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy are playing admirably with these filmic forms for a long time established.
Dom and Fiona are in love and work as teachers in the same elementary school.
Their couple is welded by the love they share for their common passion: the rumba. Unfortunately, a car accident comes to compromise the harmony that reigns between them two. Dom is found amnesic, Fiona, amputated of a leg…
Presented in a special screening during the Critic’s Week, Rumba is part the reflection that Abel, Gordon and Romy have about the body and its movements, a homogeneous reflection already started in their previous film The Iceberg like in their short film Walking On The Wild Side. The body speaks and cannot lie! And this body language is preferred to any other form language. For them, the word is not the vector of film burlesque (Rumba has almost no dialogue). The comic effects are thus mainly carried by the physical distortions (they define themselves as clowns) and by a skilful play on the sound, two processes which are not without pointing out the work of a director like Jacques Tati, taking again and revisiting the “mickeymousing” and the sincere and tender “naivety” of the characters.
Aurélie Guelff
Rumba directed by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy (with Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon,...) Special screening of the Critic’s Week