Django
Director: Étienne Comar
Starring: Reda Kateb, Cécile de France, Bea Palya
Three stars
This period drama about Django Reinhardt will please fans of his music while dismaying those looking for concrete facts about the life of the a Belgium-born French jazz guitarist of Romani decent.
Based on the historical novel Folles de Django by Alexis Salatko, first-time director Etienne Comar takes liberties with the facts as he also wants to use this tale about the life of a musician to represent how Roma people were mistreated during the Second World War.
As a construct it doesn’t always flow. The multiple narrative notes and themes fail to gel together to create a symphonic whole. When director Comar sticks to scenes in which we witness Django’s musical excellence it sings, but the fictional storyline with its tales of espionage and resistance falls rather flat.
The action takes place during wartime. It’s 1943, long after Reinhardt built a reputation as one of the finest jazz musicians on the planet, and at the Quintette du Hot Club de Paris, where Reinhardt had many of his finest nights in the 1930s, he’s now a drunk performing for the German army, who have strict rules on the type of tunes he’s allowed to play.
The music in this scene and in the entire score recorded by The Rosenberg Trio is incredible. Anyone that can tune out the more convoluted aspects of the plot and just enjoy the tunes, of which there is a lot, will have a terrific time with this movie. It will be tough to find a better score in a move theatre this year.
Director Comar, who is best known as the producer and writer of Of Gods and Men, spends time highlighting the contradictions that he wants to explore. The Nazi soldiers are enjoying music coming from a culture that they apparently despise. It's about a musician who lets success blind himself to the brutal treatment of his people. The film's dramatic opening sequence highlights the plight of the Roma people during the war in France by showing a gypsy guitarist being shot in the head by German soldiers.
The doe-eyed Reda Kateb is a fine actor best known for his work on A Prophet and Zero Dark Thirty. He plays Django as an anti-hero at first, a drunken chancer who cheats on his wife Naguine (Bea Palya). As the film develops and he gains a conscious, he becomes more dynamic. His best moments come when he's on stage, even if it's really jazz guitarist Stochelo Rosenberg playing what we hear. Unfortunately, this is not the performance that will see Kateb take the acclaim that he has in France to international shores.
Django’s main foil in this movie is his mistress, Louise de Klerk, (Cécile de France), whose ability to slip between both sides of the war is supposedly demonstrated by her refusal to give herself wholeheartedly to the married Django. They do however impersonate Hollywood movie stars, which the filmmakers must have felt was quirky and loveable but is actually tiring and loathsome, and adds nothing to the story.
The film has far more tension when it deals with Django’s relationship to the Nazis. As he becomes more aware of the war effort, he goes into hiding rather than play in propaganda concerts.
The piece de resistance is the concert in which director Comer has imagined what Django's lost composition Requiem for Gypsy Brothers would have sounded like had it survived the war. It's a musical send-off that will have you tapping down the aisles.
artslife@thenational.ae
