'Django': Life â And Music â During Wartime
Django Reinhardt
The leader of the band is Django Reinhardt  the incomparably gifted Romani jazz guitarist  soulfully embodied by the French-Algerian actor Reda Kateb. He's biding his time in the French Alps during German occupation  hoping for stealth passage across Lake Geneva into Switzerland. One of the men throwing punches is a Nazi solider  which means the inevitable: a lineup  a lockup and the sternest of warnings.  Reinhardt  is no good  it would seem  at laying low.
 Django  isn't really a biopic  despite the implication of its title: There are no misty flashbacks to  Reinhardt 's childhood stealing chickens in the French countryside  and no scene depicting the caravan fire that badly damaged  his  left hand (though  his  two mangled fingers do come up for inspection). The film is more of a fraught character study  a portrait of the artist under pressure. Comar  best known as a writer and producer of the 2010 film Of Gods and Men  brings admirable restraint to his directorial debut  keeping the stakes high and the focus taut.
 Reinhardt  is a laconic and reluctant hero: "This isn't my war "  he  growls  citing allegiance not to a flag but to a Romani's coldly pragmatic ambivalence.  Django  charts  his  awakening to the horrors of the war â notably for  his  people  whose mass extermination imbues the film with a self-righteous  lugubrious air. Comar is more effective with uneasy proximities and grim capitulations  showing how complicity can form through a series of slippages.
But the film's story â loosely adapted from Alexis Salatko's novel Folles de Django â manages to feel at once oversimplified  underfed and overburdened.  Reinhardt 's personal evolution is clumsily tracked in dialogue with a former mistress who has suffered unnamed violations at the hands of the occupiers: "You're the only person this war hasn't changed " she says bitterly to  Reinhardt . (She later rescinds the charge.) A climactic set piece at a Nazi banquet feels pat.
It's not inherently a problem that Comar does less with plot than he does with imagery: There's vivid poignancy in his depiction of the mass evacuation  and in  Reinhardt 's desperate flight through the snow. But by all accounts â the most authoritative being Michael Dregni's excellent biography Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend â Reinhardt was even more conflicted during the occupation than this film makes him out to be.
And what's meant to be a wrenching coda â the post-armistice premiere of an organ mass called "Requiem for Gypsy Brothers" â is marred by the wan pathos of the music itself  composed by Warren Ellis. As the piece plays   Reinhardt  stands dumbstruck  overcome. But if we're supposed to believe this piece represents the peak of  Reinhardt 's emotional expression  the point is discredited by earlier musical evidence. In a film that's so often about taking sides   Django  can feel at war with  itself .
The leader of the band is  [TGT] . He's biding his time in the French Alps during German occupation  hoping for stealth passage across Lake Geneva into Switzerland. One of the men throwing punches is a Nazi solider  which means the inevitable: a lineup  a lockup and the sternest of warnings.   [TGT] is no good  it would seem  at laying low.
 Django  isn't really a biopic  despite the implication of its title: There are no misty flashbacks to  Reinhardt 's childhood stealing chickens in the French countryside  and no scene depicting the caravan fire that badly damaged  his  left hand (though  his  two mangled fingers do come up for inspection). The film is more of a fraught character study  a portrait of the artist under pressure. Comar  best known as a writer and producer of the 2010 film Of Gods and Men  brings admirable restraint to his directorial debut  keeping the stakes high and the focus taut.
  [TGT] is a laconic and reluctant hero: "This isn't my war "   [TGT]   growls  citing allegiance not to a flag but to a Romani's coldly pragmatic ambivalence.  Django  charts  his  awakening to the horrors of the war â notably for  his  people  whose mass extermination imbues the film with a self-righteous  lugubrious air. Comar is more effective with uneasy proximities and grim capitulations  showing how complicity can form through a series of slippages.
But the film's story â loosely adapted from Alexis Salatko's novel Folles de Django â manages to feel at once oversimplified  underfed and overburdened.   [TGT]  's personal evolution is clumsily tracked in dialogue with a former mistress who has suffered unnamed violations at the hands of the occupiers: "You're the only person this war hasn't changed " she says bitterly to  [TGT]  . (She later rescinds the charge.) A climactic set piece at a Nazi banquet feels pat.
It's not inherently a problem that Comar does less with plot than he does with imagery: There's vivid poignancy in his depiction of the mass evacuation  and in  Reinhardt 's desperate flight through the snow. But by all accounts â the most authoritative being Michael Dregni's excellent biography Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend â  [TGT]  was even more conflicted during the occupation than this film makes him out to be.
And what's meant to be a wrenching coda â the post-armistice premiere of an organ mass called "Requiem for Gypsy Brothers" â is marred by the wan pathos of the music itself  composed by Warren Ellis. As the piece plays   Reinhardt  stands dumbstruck  overcome. But if we're supposed to believe this piece represents the peak of  Reinhardt 's emotional expression  the point is discredited by earlier musical evidence. In a film that's so often about taking sides   Django  can feel at war with  itself .