Swing (2002) - film review

During the summer holidays, Max, a 10-year old boy, stays with his grandmother in the Alsace region of France.  Frequently, he slips away to visit a community of Manouche gypsies, having befriended a young gypsy girl named Swing.  A fan of the gypsy jazz musician Django Reinhardt, Max trades his Walkman for a guitar and takes music lessons from one of the gypsies, Miraldo.  The experiences this summer gives Max will last him a lifetime…

This hotchpotch of coming-of-age comedy-drama and gypsy culture would be unbearably trite and tacky were it not for Tony Gatlif’s gift for imbuing the most banal of situations with magic and poetry, whilst conveying his passion for the gypsy way-of-life.  There is nothing too profound in Swing, and indeed it is probably Gatlif’s simplest film to date, yet it is beautifully composed and connects with its audience in a way that few contemporary films manage to.

Tony Galif’s portrayal of gypsy culture is, as in all of his films, sympathetic, colourful and rather poignant.  The film’s most touching sequence is where an old woman recounts her real-life experiences at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.  There is less music than in Gatlif’s earlier films about gypsies but what there is, in a few memorable sequences, is sufficient to give the spectator the yearning to hear more and maybe check out the music of Django Reinhardt in the nearest CD outlet.

Where the film is weakest is in its presentation of the two children Max and Swing.  Although both characters are played well (by Oscar Copp and Lou Rech respectively), there is something about their relationship which just doesn’t ring true.  Max appears too young to appreciate either jazz or the opposite sex and Swing’s interest in Max appears unfathomable.  The storyline follows the familiar coming-of-age plot mechanically and without a great deal of imagination, culminating in a totally predictable, overly sentimental ending.  Whilst this lets the film down, it doesn’t destroy it.  The simplicity of this boy-meets-girl subplot allows the film’s other elements to have greater weight and create a more balanced work.

Where the film succeeds is in capturing the richness of gypsy culture and in showing how disconnected it is from the Western society beside which it lives, vulnerable, ignored and often despised.   Gatlif’s work suggests that the West can learn much from the way that gypsies live, particularly when it comes to having a more meaningful existence.  There is something hugely symbolic in the scene in this film where a young French boy swaps his Walkman for a battered old guitar, as if to trade one cultural identity for another which offers him so much more.

© James Travers 2004

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