Django: jazzy but lazy biopic [critique]

The film about Django Reinhardt disappoints despite Reda Kateb.

France 4 will offer this Saturday evening Djangobiopic of musician Django Reinhardt, who is played by Reda Kateb. When it was released in 2016, the film disappointed the editorial staff of Firstwho still praised the actor's performance.

From A Prophet to Hippocrates: The discreet rise of Reda Kateb

Django Reinhardt, the inventor of gypsy jazz, is a little-known myth. There are few images of him and few detailed interviews. Eclectic screenwriter (Of men and gods, Flavors of the palate, My King), Etienne Comar therefore chose to tell it by default through the prism of the Occupation during which Django oscillated between passive collaboration and late awareness. At first, the darling of the Parisian Wehrmacht, he paid little attention to the war taking place outside the capital. Gradually, under the leadership of his mistress, a friend of the arts, he realizes that his life, and beyond that of his community, is in danger. He flees, his guitar under his arm…

Too impressionistic, not embodied enough

Comar evacuates psychology as much as possible and only makes Django exist through his music, from triumphant concerts in Paris, reflecting an artist intoxicated by success, to anonymous beefs in provincial bars or in gypsy camps, where Django reweaves connection with his community. And the film unfolds its little music like a mechanical piano, without false notes. This biopic in D minor is missing a true incarnation, a tipping point where the impressionistic sweetness of everyday scenes gives way to the viscerality of war and its terrible ambiguities. Impressive in the concert scenes, Reda Kateb does not, however, manage to remove the character from its purely iconic function.

The Django Reinhardt biopic opens the 2017 Berlinale