“Django” is jazzy but lacks a political beat

By N.B.

THE Berlinale often makes a point of confronting Germany’s past, as well as addressing today’s political issues. Both boxes are ticked by this year’s opening film, “Django”, a handsome drama about the great Romani jazz guitarist and composer, Django Reinhardt (Reda Kateb). Etienne Comar, its writer-director, has taken the wise decision not to attempt a cradle-to-grave biopic of the Belgian-born Reinhardt; he concentrates instead on 1943, when his Hot Club quintet was the toast of Nazi-occupied Paris.

The film introduces Reinhardt with a vibrant, extended concert sequence. He and his white-jacketed sidekicks are in a plush theatre, playing with such flair and beaming pleasure that cinema-goers will be tapping their feet along with the audience in the theatre. The twist is that many of the men in that audience are German officers. Reinhardt’s friends and relatives keep asking him what he is doing. Shouldn’t he leave the city? Shouldn’t he refuse to play for Nazis? Can or should art be separate from the people consuming it?

The Nazi officials who come to see Reinhardt play are vexed by that last question. As smitten as they are by his music, they are worried that it is too wild and insufficiently Aryan, so they try in their bureaucratic way to neuter it. Reinhardt and his band smirk as they read a list of strictures: no blues, no more than 5% syncopation, no solos lasting more than five seconds, and so on. The Nazis want Django all right, but they don’t want Django unchained (so to speak).

They also require him and his band to tour Germany, where Goebbels himself will be there to watch him in Berlin’s grandest arenas. Reinhardt is keen: this war has nothing to with him or his gypsy brethren, he shrugs. In one fascinating episode, he and his on-off mistress Louise (Cécile de France) go to an underground nightclub where newsreel footage of a Nazi rally has been re-edited for comic effect and set to a perky children’s ditty (a forerunner of the anti-fascist YouTube mash-ups we’re becoming familiar with at the moment). It is a reminder of music’s transformative effects. But Reinhardt claims that he doesn’t even know who Hitler is; his only comment on the “clown” on the screen is “shitty moustache.”

As apolitical as Reinhardt may be, Louise persuades him that the Nazis are targeting gypsies, and insists that he flee to Switzerland before they decide that he has outlived his usefulness. Reinhardt, his loyal wife (Beata Palya) and his wonderfully pugnacious mother (Bimbam Merstein) leave Paris to lodge in a misty lakeside town, waiting for the day when someone from the Resistance will row them over the lake and across the border.

Waiting means waiting. The snappy early scenes in Paris have danger, glamour and romantic intrigue, but once the action shifts to the countryside, “Django” consists of Reinhardt playing guitar in a bar—and waiting; composing a requiem on a church’s pipe organ—and waiting; visiting a local gypsy camp—and waiting. In theory, he is on the run at this point, but the film is content to dawdle along, admiring the bucolic views. It has strong performances, warm tones and, of course, virtuoso jazz, but it is strangely leisurely for the story of a daredevil escape from an oppressive regime, with none of the quicksilver nimbleness of its hero’s own influential compositions.

Reinhardt is as laid back as the rest of Mr Comar’s drama. Mr Kateb gives him the quiet, Bogartish cool of someone who is utterly comfortable in his own skin, so it isn’t unpleasant to be in his company for a couple of hours. But he isn’t shown to take any risks, to fight any battles or to make any decisions that haven’t been forced upon him. The timely questions posed in the opening scenes about art-v-politics are all but forgotten. And if Reinhardt comes to develop any opinions on Hitler which don’t encompass his moustache, we don’t hear them.

Reinhardt’s war effort, such as it is, is to play at a Nazi dinner so spellbindingly that the guards don’t notice what the Resistance is getting up to nearby: a flagrantly bogus fiction with resounding echoes of “The Sound of Music”. Still, at least the sound of music in “Django” is a delight. Jazz buffs who were disappointed that “La La Land” had so much discussion of the genre and not enough actual jazz are given plenty to luxuriate in here. It’s just a pity that the music drowns out the film’s deeper themes.

“Django” will be released in America in March and in France in April