Gypsy dance beat a bore

>> Vengo is for Flamenco fans alone

by JOANNE LATIMER

Flamenco fanatics will be beside themselves. The rest of us will sit politely through Vengo, Tony Gatlif’s latest film, and wait for it to finish. We’ll sit, silently willing the projectionist to turn down the volume—just a bit.

Gatlif hit his stride in ’92, earning public notice with Latcho Drom, touted as “the first gypsy movie.” Actually, the term gypsy isn’t politically correct anymore. The preferred word is Roma, or Romany culture. Vengo is a film about Romany culture in the Andalusian region of Spain, where two clans are in conflict.

Flamenco dance legend Antonio Canales, a Spanish national treasure, plays a Roma clan leader mourning the death of his daughter. Canales is a nervous guy, surrounded by bodyguards, living in the deserted countryside with servile grandmothers, and having twitchy cell phone calls about vengeance. Canales has his brother in hiding because a warring clan wants to kill him over the last round of retaliatory murders. Canales, in a panic over losing any more family members, transfers his attentions to his disabled nephew (Orestes Villansan Rodriguez), who is suspected to be the clan’s next target for revenge.

The bodyguards, wearing black suits and driving a Mercedes Benz, are like caricatures of urban thugs displaced in the Spanish countryside. And Canales is almost comical as an angst-ridden patriarch with no way to mend a rift between Roma clans. He thrashes around, drinking too much and playing his daughter’s CDs. The Romany turf wars in restaurants are boring displays of pride, with insults and daggers at the ready.

But the plot and its apish qualities ultimately aren’t very important. Vengo is an excuse for the music. Gatlif makes that clear in the film’s first scene, with a seemingly endless Flamenco number. Gatlif enlisted the world’s top Flamenco artists, including Tomatito and La Caita, whose voice will rattle around inside your head for hours after Gatlif’s film is over. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Vengo could’ve been a compelling documentary, instead of a half-baked Romany gangster movie. :

Vengo opens Friday, April 26