RUMBA (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy). 77 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (January 16). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNN
There are very few films dedicated to the stone-faced, largely silent physical comedy in which Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy specialize. In fact, there are just two, and they’ve made them themselves.
The first one was L’Iceberg, made in 2005. And now Abel, Gordon and Romy have reunited for Rumba, a cheerfully demented comedy about a dance-mad couple doing their best to endure some very hard times.
Abel and Gordon are Dom and Fiona, grade-school teachers who take great pride in their second careers as Latin dance champions. But a devastating car wreck brings that to an abrupt end, forcing the two to start over in extremely awkward circumstances.
You’re right in thinking that this seems like an awfully dark premise for a comedy. (A sequence in which one character spectacularly fails to teach a class while struggling with crutches seems like the Bizarro-world version of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky.)
But the chipper, can-do confidence of Dom and Fiona as cruel fate conspires to destroy their happy lives makes Rumba a modest delight. Buster Keaton would recognize our heroes’ hopeless optimism. And even Keaton never got a deadpan performance out of a Labrador retriever, as the filmmakers do here.
