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Mas o menos
Jahn Malkovich's directorial debut, "The Dancer Upstairs," squanders the intensity of its strongest moments by running away from its own political implications, not to mention by being in the wrong damn language.
By JOSHUA TANZER
Offoffoff.com
"The Dancer Upstairs" is all the more disappointing
because it includes enough scenes that are shocking on
a human level and haunting on a visual level that you
want it to hold together as a political thriller in a
way that it doesn't.
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| | | THE DANCER UPSTAIRS | Directed by: John Malkovich.
Written by: Nicholas Shakespeare.
Adapted from: his novel.
Cast: Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto, Elvira
M’nguez, Alexandra Lencastre, Oliver Cotton, Luis
Miguel Cintra, Javier Manrique, Abel Folk, Marie-Anne
Verganza, Lucas Rodr’guez, Xabier Elorriaga, Natalia
Dicenta, Wolframio SinuŽ.
In barely comprehensible English without subtitles.
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From the enigmatic, exhilarating opening scene —
in which a group of radicals in a pickup truck with a
near-dead dog in the back barrel through the South
American night and right past military checkpoints —
through a reign of terror that these revolutionaries
visit on the national capital, the film has a big
impact in its most inspired moments.
One of the most stunning comes when Javier Bardem, as
the chief investigator of terrorist attacks on the
capital, spots a frenzy of little children putting up
posters for the revolutionaries in the middle of the
night. As they evaporate away, he catches hold of one
little girl and asks what she thinks she's doing.
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"They paid me . . . ," she says
hollowly.
"Come with me. They will kill you," he tells her in
Quechua.
"I am already dead," she answers, her eyes like
ghostly voids, before vanishing again into the night.
This is the kind of unforgettable instant that the
film is capable of imprinting on your mind. But at the
same time, it exposes the most glaring hole in "The
Dancer Upstairs." Here we have the white (Spanish-born)
Bardem confronting a child who, from her face, is
obviously Indian. Her answer is cryptic, creating the
sense of mystical attachment to a shadowy, perhaps
cultish movement, but it's also inconclusive,
explaining nothing about where this movement comes
from. There must be more behind this mysterious
organization than just anger and terror — there's
something going on in the countryside, among the
Indians, that demands further exploration — but the
film never ventures there. It's a "political" thriller
that has no politics.
From here, it's just a cat-and-mouse game as the
stoical Inspector Rejas and his bouncy young sidekick
Sucre (I keep trying to put the image of Batman and Robin out of my head) try to track down the
terrorist mastermind. It's not a bad detective yarn,
but nothing more than that.
There are other basic problems in the way the film was
made. The worst is, it's made in English with all
Spanish and Latin actors. Some actors are practically
incomprehensible while others speak such clear English
that you may think their characters are Americans.
It's terribly confusing. I saw the film at the
Sundance festival in 2002, where an audience member
bluntly asked director John Malkovich, "Why the hell
did you make this film in English?" Malkovich hemmed
and hawed through a succession of answers about
creative decisions and how the book had already been
made into a Spanish movie, before basically getting to
the real reason — if it were in Spanish, of course,
Americans wouldn't come watch it. (John Sayles's far
superior "Men With Guns" is a case in point.)
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| | There's
something going on in the countryside, among the
Indians, that demands further exploration — but the
film never ventures there. It's a "political" thriller
that has no politics. |
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The difficult accents are often matched by clumsy
dialogue in implausible English with a sprinkling of
American expressions that a Latin American would never
say. The low point of the whole movie comes when the
bubbly sidekick Sucre (Juan Diego Botto) sees a beautiful woman and
exclaims, "Who put the pubes on my Coke can!" — a
line lifted from the Clarence Thomas hearings. Where
the hell did that come from? Not only has nobody in
Latin America ever heard this line, but it is not even
an exclamation that anybody in the U.S. uses. It's a
credibility-breaker.
Although the filmmakers take pains not to identify the
country where this drama takes place, it is based on
the 1992 capture of Shining Path founder Abimael
Guzman in Peru. Whatever your opinion of that
communist insurgency, it's a misrepresentation to
reduce it to a simple game of cops and bombers.
Powerful guerrilla movements grow out of severe social
conditions, and government repression typically makes
the conditions worse. Such was the case in Peru, whose
former president is now a fugitive from justice amid
investigations of disappearances, executions and
corruption.
Compared to this reality, "The Dancer Upstairs," is a
terribly timid effort. Staring rural and Indian social
discontent literally in the face, Malkovich's already
awkward film simply blinks.
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MAY 1, 2003
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