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May 8-14, 2003 movies The Underneath
In The Dancer Upstairs, revolution happens in secret. When, not long after the fact, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen referred to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as "the greatest work of art there has ever been," the negative reaction was instantaneous; performances of Stockhausen’s works were canceled, and he was raked over the coals on editorial pages around the world. Stockhausen later said he’d been taken out of context, that the artist whose work he was discussing was, in fact, Lucifer. But even without elaboration, there’s a troublesome grain of truth to his words. Bypassing the ultimately fruitless discussion of what is and isn’t art, there’s an undeniable extent to which terrorism appropriates the tools of art (or, if you wish, propaganda). Analyzing terrorism’s symbolic resonance is a tricky business: philosopher Jean Baudrillard tried it and fell off the deep end, treating the World Trade Center attacks as if they only existed on an allegorical plane. But the intended symbolism, the attack on American financial and technological might, was obvious, and effective, enough. Incapable of assaulting governments directly, terrorists attack metaphorically: Suicide bombers in Israel target not military installations, but markets, buses, ice cream parlors, aiming less at the loss of specific lives than at the intangible sense of security. (In one case, a suicide bombing literally became art after the fact, when a group of students at a West Bank university created an installation -- later closed on orders from Arafat -- depicting the aftermath of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem Sbarro.) There is, of course, a world of difference between art and terrorism -- when André Breton said that the ultimate surrealist act would be to fire a pistol into a crowd, he wasn’t actually suggesting anyone give it a whirl -- but that doesn’t prevent the one from taking a few cues from the other. The Dancer Upstairs opens with the juxtaposition between art and murder. As a pickup truck speeds down a dark dirt road, Nina Simone's voice is heard on the soundtrack, winding through an introduction to a song we won't hear until much later. Late in her career, Simone's voice is cracked, defeated, but the three people in the pickup keep driving, even when a police officer steps out to block their path. They run him down, and keep moving. The import of this opening sequence, which ends with the three being questioned and released by a young officer named Rejas (Javier Bardem), doesn't become clear for a while, but it's sufficiently evocative to leave no doubt that we'll be seeing at least some of the people in the pickup again. Who they are, though, and what they might want remains obscure. The scene, identified only as "Latin America, the recent past," shifts to years later. Rejas has become a successful metropolitan police detective, settled into a comfortable life. A former lawyer who's "trying to find a more honest way of practicing the law," Rejas accepts the corruption endemic to the government, but tries to keep his hands clean, and remains an optimist, if not a starry-eyed one. "Just because the president is a rapist, it doesn't make democracy bad," he tells his short-tempered partner, Sucre (Juan Diego Botto). As in any country where a military regime lurks behind the cloak of democracy, stability is a matter of inches, and that stability starts to erode rapidly when it becomes clear that there's a link between a series of mysterious incidents that both troubles and arouses the nation's people. Dead dogs with dynamite stuffed in their mouths, are found hanging from lampposts, some with messages attached. ("When I hear the word culture " reads one, in homage to one of the 20th century's greatest propagandists.) At the same time, public leaders are being assassinated with increasing, unpredictable frequency -- in one case, by a smiling child who yells out, "Viva el Presidente Ezequiel!" before blowing himself up. The trouble is that no one seems to know who "Ezequiel" might be, or what his followers might want. "It appears a revolution may be going on," says Rejas, "but a revolution that has yet to declare itself in that orientation." Like the audience, whose understanding of the situation is pushed to an archetypal level by the story's generic setting, so Rejas has to decode a (potential) revolution whose signs accumulate without coalescing. In fact, for a while, Rejas' investigation seems to be progressing in reverse: The more he finds out, the less he knows. Viewers familiar with Latin American history, and certainly anyone familiar with Nicholas Shakespeare's source novel, will recognize the shadow of Peru's Shining Path, whose leader was a portly philosophy professor named Abimael Guzmán. Indeed, during a recent visit to Philadelphia, Bardem discussed the movie's setting as if it were, unambiguously, Peru. (It was filmed in Spain, Ecuador and Portugal.) But the undefined setting is more than literary sleight of hand. Like the setting of Constantin Costa-Gavras' Z -- which, though obviously Costa-Gavras' native Greece, remains unnamed -- Dancer's abstracted terrain removes the story from the landscape of history. It becomes instead a story about the disturbing power, even appeal, of symbolic murder. That a few of Dancer's assassinations are carried out as part of an abstract theater piece is only the most literal manifestation of the extent to which Ezequiel and his followers conceive their takeover in theatrical terms. Though Ezequiel proclaims himself the "fourth flame of Communism, after Marx, Lenin and Mao," there seems to be no fixed ideology behind his revolution, other than the unmaking of the present situation. It's anarchy in its purest, most volatile form. "Socrates never wrote anything down; neither did Jesus," reads a document eventually retrieved from Ezequiel's pre-underground past. "Writing assumes a life of its own -- it cannot answer questions." Rejecting manifestoes, Ezequiel's followers seem to have conceived a revolution on purely existentialist terms, one where actions are the only speech. Directed by John Malkovich with the icy control familiar from his performances, The Dancer Upstairs moves forward with an ineluctable dread that's like a humanist inverse to the bloodless logic of the murder-by-numbers Identity. The movie's style is composed, implacable (the cinematography is by José Luis Alcaine), and its flirtation with the shape of the political thriller only increases the extent to which Rejas seems like a man alone. (A contentious military official asks if he's "the Gary Cooper type," but he's more like Jimmy Stewart.) As Bardem plays him, he's neither pawn nor player, working for the government not because he believes in it, but because he believes in the idea of government. The unconsummated romance between Rejas and his daughter's dance teacher (Laura Morante), not part of the novel, reveals little about him, and figures heavily in the movie's muddled epilogue -- it seems to stem from a misguided attempt to make the story about Rejas, when in fact he is just the silent witness to events he will never understand. Dancer is never fully at home with the mechanics of the political thriller; indeed, it doesn't even seem that interested in them. (The decision to film in English, a language native to none of the movie's actors, undoubtedly contributes to some of the plot garbling, but it's more that it simply wasn't a priority.) Mood and philosophy are more the point, the sense of a country dissolving, or perhaps reconstituting itself, in secret -- a revolution that not only starts within, but continues under the skin, not emerging until it's almost fully formed. Among other things, Dancer serves as a warning that even profound change can escape official notice: The higher you build watchtowers, the farther you get from the ground. The Dancer Upstairs Directed by John Malkovich A Fox Searchlight release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse
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