Soundtrack to a Coup d'État

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a dense and meticulously constructed picture.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat relates not just Lumumba’s assassination but the larger role the Congo, a nation rich with natural resources, played in the Cold War, and the so-called Congo Crisis’ surprising intersections with midcentury American jazz.

It’s the quietly magisterial Fiennes who steals the show. Don’t be surprised to see white smoke billowing out of the Academy Awards come March.

It might manifest as a straightforward historical documentary, but the fascinating, hypnotic Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat unfolds into something much deeper -- and more sinister.

The effect, although lengthy at two-and-a-half hours, is dreamlike yet propulsive, a timeline that’s optimistic and sinister at the same moment.

This is a film which has a little of Oliver Stone in the way it inhales something eerie and sinister in the atmosphere, and it’s something to set alongside Leon Gast’s 1996 documentary When We Were Kings.

A rich account of a violent history that most Americans have likely forgotten — which is a shame, since American tax dollars, funneled through the CIA, financed a lot of it.

An inspired detective-like piecing-together of a painful, chronologically shredded historical trajectory that might have been too ambitious (or impossible) to cover without the cleverly devised bebop shortcuts.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’s stylish use of memoirs by people who were there, as well as copious archival footage, seeks to tame the sprawling Congo Crisis.

[Johan Grimonprez] establishes a powerful tension here where the artistic becomes an uncomfortable ally of power, investigating its own capacity for influence. [Full review in Spanish]