Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

Perhaps the most important objective of a documentary is to shed light on a subject and make it comprehensible and insightful for viewers, especially when it involves little-known material. However, when it comes to writer-director Johan Grimonprez’s latest offering, that goal is sorely compromised in multiple respects. The film examines (or, more precisely, attempts to examine) the complex history of the Congo’s struggle for independence from its Belgian colonial masters and the emergence of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba as a global influencer in the 1950s and early 1960s. The fledgling, resource-rich nation became a flashpoint in international politics on various fronts, including the Cold War between East and West, the rise of the pan-African movement, the ongoing decline of colonial imperialism and the role of the United Nations in global affairs. Its impact also extended into American politics, particularly the birth and growth of the civil rights movement and its impact on leaders like Malcolm X, as well as the Eisenhower Administration’s veiled efforts at protecting the status quo, especially through seemingly benign cultural programs like goodwill exchanges involving popular Black jazz musicians. Many threads are thus involved in telling this tale, but, regrettably, they’re not coherently managed, particularly in the picture’s opening hour (of a surprisingly and arguably somewhat needlessly overlong 2:30:00 runtime). The filmmaker throws a lot of widely diverse material at his audience without coherent, meaningful explanation, and much of that involves reading a series of cryptic screen graphics that fly by hastily with little elaboration, a process that quickly becomes aggravating, frustrating and tiresome, even for the most adept subtitle readers. Then there’s the jazz aspect of this release, whose connection to the narrative isn’t always made clear or relevant, despite its addition of an element of artistic flair. However, these performance sequences – as entertaining and poignant as they are – ultimately do more to promote the film’s style than its substance, To its credit, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” becomes more cogent (albeit somewhat politically oversimplified) as it moves forward, but, by that point, audiences may well have lost patience with it (I was admittedly on the verge of turning it off myself after the opening 60 minutes, something I generally never do). It’s also obvious that the material here was exceedingly well researched and incorporates a wealth of revelatory archive footage, both from journalistic and jazz performance sources, qualities definitely worthy of commendation. However, a more fluid, better organized telling of this tale (especially one that doesn’t skip around out of temporal sequence) would have helped immeasureably, as would have a better elucidated nexus between its political and musical aspects. There’s clearly an important story to be told here, but this isn’t the vehicle for doing so.