Terror Firmer
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. Embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials, here and in Peru, blamed the attack on Shining Path — a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s. The claim stunned those who believed Shining Path had been decimated, if not eradicated, in 1992 with the capture of its founder and leader, former college professor Abimael Guzman, who called himself Comrade Gonzalo. Shining Path was responsible for the deaths of 30,000 Peruvians, whom Guzman considered combatants in his war of liberation. Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori had him dressed in prison stripes and dangled from a steel cage, from which Guzman delivered one final speech of revolution before being committed to an underground prison cell for the rest of his life.
In 1995, Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel The Dancer Upstairs used Guzman’s tale to conjure a sort of thriller-cum-love story set against acts of terrorism both violent and symbolic — the dangling of dead dogs from lampposts and the slaughtering of military officials by young schoolgirls brandishing machine guns. Shakespeare, who served as a journalist during the Shining Path manhunt, wrote a novel as much about the personal politics of police inspector Agustin Rejas — a decent man beset by corrupt government officials and a shallow, social-climbing wife — as it was about the Maoist-inspired violence and eventual capture of “President Ezequiel,” the Guzman stand-in.
Now John Malkovich, making the transition from actor to film director, has brought Shakespeare’s novel to theaters. The story survives the translation from grisly fact to compelling literature to big-screen thriller; Graham Greene might have approved. Indeed, The Dancer Upstairs would have made a suitable double feature with The Quiet American; both films unfold slowly, build toward an anxiety-inducing climax and end with a shrug of grief. Both hinge on noble men who feel more powerless, the more valiant their actions. And the man at the center of each is in love with the wrong woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. Javier Bardem’s Rejas falls for his daughter’s dance instructor, Yolanda (Laura Morante), who may be choreographing something altogether more sinister.
The Dancer Upstairs unfolds in an unspecified time and place, somewhere in Latin America in the recent past. Malkovich further disorients us by having everyone, regardless of nationality, speak English and by bookending his tale with a rambling Nina Simone rendition of “Where Did the Time Go?” It plays twice, once on the car stereo of terrorists who run down a police officer standing in their path. The movie doesn’t really build tension; from the very beginning, we’re ill at ease, witness to extreme violence and placed in a very bad dream. (The movie often feels like an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 Sabotage, itself an adaptation of Joseph Conrad.)
Bardem, in his midthirties, here resembles Oliver Reed and acts like Gary Cooper. (“Perhaps I am the Gary Cooper type,” he jokes when prodded about his actions.) It is Bardem who holds our interest as the body count rises, a corrupt government interferes with his investigation, and he falls for a woman who allows him a brief respite from urban violence and domestic misery. Bardem doesn’t say much. He rarely raises his voice and loses his temper only once; he says everything with his eyes — as does the rarely seen Ezequiel, a partial photo of whom, taken by Rejas early in the film, stares out from posters carried by children of the revolution. Bardem’s is a remarkable performance — the quiet Peruvian, perhaps, who might win but will never triumph.
