Each Abel-Gordon-Romy scenario is like a test, or challenge – in heroic terms, a trial – the filmmakers put to themselves, culminating in the couple going it alone for Lost in Paris. Rumba sets itself up as a film about dance and dancers, then removes one of the pair’s legs; the film goes on to explore the (ulp) comic possibilities of disability. (The point being that, though hindered, she remains undaunted.) Coupled with her partner’s amnesia, the story becomes an essay on how these two who were themselves once whole, like the androgynes legendarily separated in order to find each other again, strive against encumbrance to reunite, compromised yet complete.
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When there are no words, we dance.
Though it’s seldom the focus of the films of Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, dance is always the operating principle. (Abel and Gordon act, Romy co-directs; you should see them move.) Each production, so far including L’Iceberg (2005), Rumba (sic; 2008), The Fairy (2011), and Lost in Paris (2017, the latter sans Romy), features at least one routine, though I dare you to call them that. Choreographers describe their art in terms of building, and that’s how Abel-Gordon-Romy craft their movies: each scene is a set-piece constructed of small observations that echo and rhyme, flowing this way and that with their own logic and intuition, touching down on earth only so long as to maintain balance, until arriving at a point you may not have anticipated at the start but that feels right once there. Their characters’ arcs tango accordingly, weaving and winding around each other’s to occasionally lift and spin before progressing to the next movement. The end of their journeys, where all meet and resolve, can make you feel there’s order to the world after all; it’s only a matter of time our cottoning to it.
Australian-born, Canadian-bred Gordon met husband Abel in Paris where they studied theater, and later formed production company Courage Mon Amour with him in Abel’s Belgium. Though a lot of Gordon’s characters’ awkwardness begins with their occasional tentativeness with the language, it’s the sense of adventure implicit in her globe-hopping that informs both their work. Loose-limbed and stretchy, the two are exotic birds who woke up in the wrong bodies and are still working out the mechanics; they came to film late, and the development of their style across the quartet is analogous. They’re physical comedians in the mold of Pierre Étaix and Jacques Tati whose every moment on-screen is a comment on what strange and wonderful things our bodies are, ungainly and absurd yet capable of boundless expression. Inhibiting though they be, what Abel and Gordon do with these bodies celebrates the liberation of release, discovery: of themselves, each other, and the wide, unpredictable world their characters are inevitably drawn into.
The Surrealist vein runs deep. Each film delivers its characters into an uncanny canyon, often requiring a taking-leave of the senses to get there or to restore things to a different version of normal afterward. L’Iceberg’s Fiona (both performers typically take their own names for the characters they play) is driven by a life-threatening event to seek new life on the title object; Rumba’s dance-contest aficionados’ world is similarly upended by a near-fatal encounter with a suicide manqué (boxy A-G-R mascot and possible Romy-surrogate Philippe Martz) resulting in Dom’s protracted and surprisingly unresolved amnesia; Dom’s blah desk-clerk life is spun by Fiona’s entrance one night as the title Fairy, actually an escapee from a nearby mental hospital who nevertheless offers (and grants?) him his wishes; finally, a despairing note from dotty Aunt Martha (Resnais icon Emmanuelle Riva) is an invitation to destiny for Fiona with Dom’s sozzled, cross-dressing, tent-dwelling Lost in Paris romantic. There are other irruptions of the irrational-sublime, as in Fairy-Fiona’s spontaneous pregnancy and that film’s L’Amour Flou bakery-cum-tavern where hero and heroine, blind proprietor, singing women’s soccer team, dog-smuggling tourist (Martz again) and a similar trio of car-trunk clandestines converge. The implication is that you have to leave what you know to find what you may never have guessed you wanted.
Background is everything. Like the affectless realm of early Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki, the A-G-R world is calm to the point of taciturnity, or even catalepsy; the camera’s eye is similarly fixed, waiting dully for something of interest to pass before it, as it always does. When characters do express emotion it’s distanced, as through a proscenium, like when L’Iceberg’s Julian (the only time either actor appears under alias) realizes his wife has abandoned him: we hear his wail from outside their bungalow, as if it were the cry of the house, or housing development, itself. Nondescript environs like these beg either escape or the infusion of the sublime. The Fairy’s two dance sequences, both staged as the most modest of production numbers (one takes place undersea, with plastic-shopping-bag jellyfish floating by, the other atop Dom’s hotel, roundly pregnant Fiona a focused flightless fowl), are contrapuntal to their surroundings. The dances are expressions of what the characters have lost touch with in their lives but not in their hearts.
… or is what they feel simply beyond words? Dance, an abstract form, can’t describe specificity, but it can express feeling – affect – drama: it speaks for, and through, the performers. There’s a grammar to physical movement, as peculiar to a culture as its language (compare, say, Maya Deren’s “Meditation on Violence,” on Japanese martial-arts form, and “Divine Horsemen,” her account of Haitian voodoo rituals), though its inflection, dynamics, stresses, and lulls thwart linguistic baffles. There are solos in dance, as there are monologues in speech, but in Abel-Gordon-Romy the dance is always conversational, an exchange between bodies, by turns beckoning, teasing, cajoling, yearning, seductive, ribald, insinuating, needy, inviting; the filmmakers are clearly tickled by all aspects of the mating ritual. And there’s so much in that exchange! Worry; eagerness; anticipation; contained-to-bursting elation. Does he? Is she? She laughed! Is that a signal? When is it permissible to cross this space and close this distance? You want to be spun, tossed, cradled, twisted, chased, poised, and positioned – or, alternatively, spinning, tossing, cradling, twisting, chasing, poising, and positioning. Balanced. Responding and responded to. You need that conversation to fix your place in the world, in each other’s.
How close is comedy to dance? The great physical comedians were dancers, too: light on their feet. Even rotund W. C. Fields balanced himself within his spaces. (He was a juggler, too: he knew how to keep things in the air how long and what to do when they came down.) Both mediums are negotiations with physical space, comedy physics with a dose of Sartre. There are nods to the comic greats throughout A-G-R, from L’Iceberg’s against-the-odds Buster Keatonesque quest and dash of Surrealism to Lost in Paris’s climactic Harold Lloyd comedy of mortal peril, along the way folding in everything from Pepe le Pew to the whimsy and absurdism of Carmen Miranda, Marcel Marceau, Roman Polanski, Renoir’s Boudu and René Clair, with hints of Robert Flaherty, L’Atalante, M. R. James by way of the BBC, Frankenstein, Herman Melville and Michael Powell, as well as musical contributions from The Ventures, Maxine Sullivan, Kurt Weill, Xavier Cugat, “Sea of Love,” and the occasional thrum of EDM. The company they keep! (Be forewarned, though: one of the traditions they evoke, in one of their pictures, suggests minstrelsy, an unfortunate if naïve choice they rectify in later features with less problematic representations. Such occasional oversights are the recessive chin of their ouevre.)
What all these arts and artists have in common is an attention to the line: the gesture or phrase, the telling observation, measure, contour, or movement within a frame, the connective thread, or frisson; the moment a point comes clear or comes home. Dance is calligraphy, finding a flow out of the need to articulate what can’t be spoken. In a deadpan world like A-G-R’s, this may be most resonant as the movement from affect to emotion: from taking it all in to letting it all hang out. Think of the pantomime in L’Iceberg (recalling the BBC Ghost Story for Christmas “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You”) where Fiona rises in the night and begins voguing under her bedsheet. She’s trying to tell her clueless, possibly overwhelmed (like her) husband she’s become a ghost in her life, at the same time she’s reorganizing herself like the lovers at the end of Altered States and creating a cocoon she’ll soon discard to begin her quixotic quest. Then there’s the inexplicable salmon on the shelf behind Lost in Paris’s librarian, that takes on sudden significance when Fiona is found swimming in the next scene against the stream of travelers in that film’s City of Romance, or Rumba’s amnesiac Dom losing track every time he turns from his recipe book, serially adding “Three eggs … Three eggs …” till he’s run the dozen, like Paris’s nonagenarian Aunt Martha lifting her weights “97 … 98 … 99 … 100” times, to restart “97 … 98 … ,” both ghosts themselves lodged in an affective loop broken only by the liberating lift of romance.
The dances, even when incorporating traditional forms like tango or jazz, are in the modern mode, their lines and gestures angular, sprung; if they have any mistress it would be Isadora Duncan, or Twyla Tharp, as interpreted by wobbly birds. They invent themselves as they move, their every routine a divertissement interrupting the narrative branching of their stories to amplify or project an emotional nuance. With each formation they’re modeling the architecture of their desire for each other, an armature that’s forever evolving and sometimes even surprises themselves. The only thing constraining them is their surroundings.
On this freedom, then, and the quest:
Each Abel-Gordon-Romy scenario is like a test, or challenge – in heroic terms, a trial – the filmmakers put to themselves, culminating in the couple going it alone for Lost in Paris. Rumba sets itself up as a film about dance and dancers, then removes one of the pair’s legs; the film goes on to explore the (ulp) comic possibilities of disability. (The point being that, though hindered, she remains undaunted.) Coupled with her partner’s amnesia, the story becomes an essay on how these two who were themselves once whole, like the androgynes legendarily separated in order to find each other again, strive against encumbrance to reunite, compromised yet complete.
For L’Iceberg’s Fiona, freedom and the quest are synonymous. Literally frozen out of her catatonic family life when locked inside her fast-food restaurant walk-in and neither husband Julian nor two children notice her missing, she sets out on a journey to find a new home on the title formation, a fixation as liberating as it is strangely sexual. (The whole adventure is a shaggy-dog story describing how the Inuktitut-speaking wraparound narrator met her husband, the deaf-mute boatsman who helps Fiona reach her dream; both Julian and Fiona are casually ejected from the story in the end, a mere McGuffin for native Nattikutuk to find her own fulfillment.) The Fairy finds both Fiona and Dom captives of their mutual prisons – the hotel where he’s night manager and the hospital where she resides – her conviction she’s the title nymph the principle freeing both himself and the three Black clandestines, liberated from their trunk to gaze out to sea in the film’s final shot. (As in L’Iceberg, the minorities are privileged in the end, with Dom and Fiona last seen unresolved, on the run.) Lost in Paris might be a fabulization of Gordon’s experience spanning her Canada home where the film begins (in the snow-fogged past, with the voice of Aunt Martha announcing her own intention to travel, like a secret shared between elements of herself, in the frozen womb where L’Iceberg’s quest incubates) and finding love with Dom in their mutual destination.
Rumba’s sweethearted suitor serenades Fiona with a fireside “Sea of Love,” lending resonance to their beachside reunion-site. That’s where the film’s only other dance sequence after the opening titles plays out, too, a tango on the surface of the same ocean The Fairy finds them courting at the bottom of and L’Iceberg sends Fiona across in search of her passion. It’s a metaphor for the expanses separating the sexes and lovers of all stripes (one thinks, too, of the oceans real-life Fiona crossed to find Dom) as well as the one body making their union possible. When not an ocean in A-G-R, it’s the rivers running through – either conducting, hemming, or, in the case of Paris, swallowing their characters on their journeys. If the seas suggest love, the body, the Unconscious, the rivers are the currents connecting them and drawing us to their source. Lost resolves with the three main characters looking out across not the Atlantic, this time, but from a girder of the Eiffel Tower, though a coda where Fiona and Dom certify their romance takes place beside the Seine, where they deposit Martha’s ashes to flow, we assume, to that same ocean Fiona traversed to find both her and Dom. It’s the vein, or line, running through the city, as through the filmmakers’ works.
The means these characters take on their journeys involve bikes, scooters, sneakers, car trunks, campers, arm flapping, a paddy wagon, and the auto driven by L’Amour Flou’s half-blind proprietor. A testament to the adage that motion is truth, A-G-R is about moving forward, even if not always willingly, and sometimes even if it’s toward an iceberg: the point is in simply going. By contrast, Fiona’s refrain throughout The Fairy is for Dom to “Take your time” deciding on a third wish, even as the two plummet off a cliff. Abel and Gordon were in their late forties when they turned to the cinema after a couple of decades on stage, Romy in his early forties when he made his first feature, Le Bar des amants, in 1998, after stints teaching math, managing a theater and a supermarket, and performing as a clown. Though relative novices, they bring years of practice, study, discipline, discovery, eclecticism, and experimentation up behind them.
So maybe their characters (like their dances, similarly pacey and gestural) aren’t so dull as they come off, initially. They’re just slowed down enough to be observed, the message being, these things are meant to be seen. Their films, like Tati’s, invite us to slow down, too, and discover the humor for ourselves before things get out of hand, their characters maintaining their poise even when the attendants in their clean white coats are coming for them or the baby is plunging down a hotel floor: No hurry, they seem to be saying; time is only running out.
Holly Brubach, in her essay on “A Classic ‘Beauty,’” describes the relation between two fairies in Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, one whose theme is in a major key while the other’s is in its relative minor, and the transcendent moment when each is, as she tells it, “briefly in the other’s key.” When hotel manager Dom dances with Fiona in their film, he’s dancing with just such a fairy, a magical, unlikely thing: the possibility of wonder in his dreary life. At the same time, the film around them flattens, demystifies the romantic notion of such a thing at all, knowing that the romance – the story and characters – is strong enough to survive the flattening. The same tension appears in their tango scene in Lost in Paris, when down-and-out Fiona is swept off her feet by the blunt, unshaven hobo who she finally realizes is wearing the yellow sweater she’s just lost and who offers to pay for dinner using her money. There, too, Aunt Martha’s park bench pas de deux with long-lost love Max, played by Tall Blond Man Pierre Richard, ends with their losing each other once again and for all when he goes off for a second to reclaim the – yes – One Black Shoe he’d flung off, still in the pajamas he no doubt wandered away from the old-age home in. All movement is movement forward; it can’t be stopped. Time only goes one way, and movement and time are one.
The dance in Abel-Gordon-Romy is never about power dynamics: each character is dependent on the other for balance, stability, safety, and grace. Neither is it about Self vs. Gravity, as in slapstick, or vaudeville. Each is a reminder of the heaviness of bodies, but also the comedy – the awkwardness, the angularity. As dance rides on the rhythm of music, comedy rises and falls on frustration and desire. The combination is like crossing an ocean to find one’s life, one’s love, one’s métier. But then, that’s not an original observation; Abel-Gordon-Romy knew that long before I did, and they expressed it –
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