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.

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]

With its complex mapping of information, this is a far less passive viewing experience than most popular historical documentaries, but that's by design: the issues are difficult and Grimonprez, admirably, refuses to reduce them to pat summaries.

With artful editing, this mostly archival documentary tells how the independence of Congo, competition for resources, and political exploitation of American jazz stars intertwined and resulted in the 1961 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba.