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Vengo
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My favourite scene in Tony Gatlif's Vengo starts with several characters staggering around an open road, trying to get the best signal on their mobile phone. At one point, the phone is held in the air so as to catch some music playing on a radio. A car approaches and is waved to the side, so as not to interrupt the call. Cut to some time later – everyone, the main characters and the strangers from the car, are merrily comparing flamenco dance moves. In passages like this, the plot gets distracted, shoved aside. And that is the glory of Gatlif's work, from the mid '70s to the present: the meandering paths it loves to take as it weaves together a tapestry of song, dance, gypsy life, folk culture and primal passions. Set in Andalucia, the slim storyline of Vengo involves the simmering tensions between two gypsy families. Revenge must be exacted for a death, and the nearest available relative to the murderer is the disabled Diego (Orestes Villasan Rodriguez). Much of the film concentrates on the friendship between Diego and his soulfully tormented family protector, Caco (Antonio Canales). This powerful story plays out with all the inevitability of grand tragedy – and a similar sense of wasted, human potential. But, as if in contradistinction to the brutal limits of this narrative, Gatlif multiplies plotless moments in which singing and dancing fill or disrupt every kind of social occasion. The film begins with a journey by an audience to a performance by Sheikh Ahmad Al Tuni and the band Tomatito – an ecstatic blend of Egyptian Sufi song and flamenco. The show has no strict relation to the plot, but it stands as an almost ritualistic, incantatory introduction to Gatlif's pet themes of division and reconciliation, passion and loss. This scene is worthy of the cinema's greatest musical moments. In Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire (1941) and A Song is Born (1948), jazz rhythms were allowed to literally call the shots – where and how people moved, as well as how the camera captured them, depended utterly on the musical form. Gatlif works to a similar plan. As the music grows and builds in the opening scene, new elements of the scene, new portions of space and place, magically appear and accumulate. The timing of each edit, as always in Gatlif, is glorious. In Gatlif's oeuvre (of which not even half has reached Australia), Vengo is superior to Gadjo Dilo (1998) but not as remarkable as Latcho Drom (1993). Whereas, in that film, the fusion of documentary and fiction was perfect, here the mix is lumpier, although no less vital. The melodramatic element, while intense, sometimes feels sketched rather than fully developed. Gatlif's work sometimes arouses suspicion for its packaging of exotic people and cultures – the sort of charge often laid upon the most superficial sectors of the world music industry. For his part, he claims to reject "anything that smacks of folklore, ethnology or reverence". The truth of his assertion can be found in the marvellous way he combines the old with the new, folk styles with technological media – sometimes in a deliberately comic, incongruous way (as with the mobile phones and cassette players). His dexterous blend of the very machinery of cinema – its filming, editing, recording and mixing apparatuses – with the seemingly live performances and movements of his players is testament to this. Equally crucial to Gatlif's aesthetic and ethical vision is the insertion of some quite surreal moments into Vengo – especially when the dying agony of a character is accompanied by a vast musique concrète of pounding, pumping, steaming machines. For this spectacular set piece among many, Vengo should not be missed. MORE Gatlif: Children of the Stork, Exiles, Swing © Adrian Martin November 2001 |
