Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat: Uneven narratives of 20th century geopolitics set to astonishingly good jazz
Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’s film, which runs 150 minutes and covers decades of exceedingly complex history, struggles to connect its musical and geopolitical elements
★★½
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Directed by Johan Grimonprez
Screenplay by Johan Grimonprez
Not Rated. Now playing in select theaters. (Screening reviewed at Harvard Law School)
Oscar-nominated documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat belies its two primary interests in the title: music and geopolitics. At times, their connection in the 20th century was exceptionally clear. For example, the United States’ "jazz ambassador" program sponsored musical legends such as Louis Armstrong in the 1950s and 1960s to promote American values and cultural soft power by traveling to places like Africa. But Belgian director Johan Grimonprez's film, which runs 150 minutes and covers the exceedingly complex history of the Congo Crisis, struggles to connect these musical and geopolitical elements.
The Congo was under colonial rule by King Leopold II of Belgium in the 1800s, who implemented systems of ruthless violence to extract huge amounts of natural resources and impose strict racial segregation for nearly a hundred years. (Belgium has since officially apologized to some degree for colonization and related wrongdoings.) But Grimonprez's art-film background, formed at a Belgian art school, the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the Whitney Museum, prevents him from telling a coherent narrative about the complicated histories of European involvement in Africa, American global affairs and espionage, and Soviet inroads into Africa and other Non-Aligned Movement member states.
Gimonprez’s art education formulated a perspective informed by a meta-critique of film itself. His own website opens onto a 1994 essay titled “Against Documentary” that serves as a send-up of the very movies he makes, mocking the director for putting money toward “yet another film on political strife.” This academic perspective is well-suited for film essays, gallery videos, and art history analysis, but is less appropriate for a traditional documentary format on music and politics.
Indeed, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat flips between its two subjects and rarely settles on a timeline or relational theory of events. Clips of African political campaigns are interspersed with African-American thought leaders like Malcolm X; brassy jazz solos in New York nightclubs are cut with dealings at the United Nations Security Council; bold typographic choices are handsome, but fill the screen for frustrating amounts of time. Throughout the documentary, it's hard not to marvel at the quality of the archival footage or the remarkable beauty of the jazz pieces, but it all comes in barrages of content.
Some vignettes are told well. When Nikita Khrushchev and Che Guevara visit American soil for a United Nations event, spending time cavorting together in Harlem and making media appearances on the sidewalk outside the historical Hotel Theresa, the energy is infectious (and could be a movie unto itself). Plus, the hip, jiving score matches the moment. Similarly, protestors' storming of the UN General Assembly is powerful, especially paired with a song featuring a primal scream. The pent-up anger towards Western imperialism erupts through both the physical rioting and the musical cacophony.
Other choices are less harmonious. Grimonprez is infatuated with the United Nations; he credits Khrushchev's shoe-banging incident in the General Assembly as inspiration for the documentary. But the movie's coverage of the UN is one-note and repetitive. We see, over and over, a bloc of Asian and African countries voting for a motion, just for the US to stand against it, and the Soviet Union responding with the same tired stump speeches. All this posturing is familiar to any student who did Model UN in high school and doesn't merit its share of the film.
Soundtrack misses elsewhere, too. For instance, a few of its interviews are especially haunting in their cavalier attitude towards cruelty exhibited to the Congolese people. In one, CIA Director Allen Dulles jokes about how the Agency interfered with local elections; in others, several mercenaries describe, tongue in cheek, the indiscriminate killing of Congolese people for money. One German gun-for-hire even flashes his Nazi Iron Cross.
These moments show the craven underside of the Congo Crisis on full display. However, Grimonprez refuses to linger on some of these overwhelming or vile parts of history, which does the film a disservice. Instead of letting the audience sit with a particularly shocking piece of information, Soundtrack repeatedly turns to an upbeat jazzy number or yet another UN hearing. Although the dissonance could work in a museum setting, it becomes exhausting for several hours in a theater.
The same is true for multiple fourth-wall-breaking cuts to modern advertisements for Apple and Tesla. While the ads overtly connect modern technological products to the minerals made possible by Congolese mining, it's done in a way so painfully obvious that some audience members giggled. Connecting the past to our present could have been accomplished in a more thoughtful way; for example, a clip showing the modern forced evacuation of a Congolese family is far more effective as a tie-in to the 21st century.
Grimonprez's efforts to comb through mountains of historic footage, first-person accounts, and jazz pieces were no doubt heroic. If only his findings were crafted into a tighter, clearer narrative.