In his only acting role, the late jazz great Miles Davis, who also worked on the soundtrack with film composer Michel Legrand, elevates DINGO, an otherwise slight-but-engaging Australian-French co-production.
In the film's prologue, Paris-based American jazz trumpeter Billy Cross (Davis) and his combo find themselves momentarily stranded on an airstrip in the Australian outback village of Poona Flats. Instantly assuming the role of self-appointed ambassador of good vibes, Cross stages an impromptu
concert on the tarmac, leaving youngster John Anderson entranced. Cross urges the boy to take up an instrument and invites him to look him up if he's ever in Paris before reboarding his plane. The action picks up with grown-up John "Dingo" Anderson (Colin Friels), a fortysomething trapper of wild
dogs undergoing a mid-life crisis as he approaches his birthday.
Following Billy's advice, Anderson took up the trumpet and now, with his "Dingo Dusters," plays an odd hybrid of country-and-western and cool jazz at local dances. But he has also kept up a one-sided correspondence with Cross while secretly saving cash to go to Paris, which has made life pinched
and uncomfortable for his loving wife Jane (Helen Buday) and two young daughters. To help lift Dingo's funk, Jane writes to Billy's Paris agent, hoping he will convince Billy to send Dingo a birthday card. The sympathetic wife of the agent, who has all along kept Dingo's letters and tapes from
reaching Billy, secretly forwards Jane's letter. Later, at Billy's request, she also forwards Dingo's tapes and letters.
Billy is impressed enough to buy one of his compositions and issues a telegram invitation to Dingo to visit him in Paris. Once there, Dingo has his fleeting moment of triumph when he trades solos with Billy onstage at an ultra-hip Parisian jazz club. However, Billy warns Dingo that moving to
Paris would change his music, and not necessarily for the better. Happier and wiser, Dingo takes Billy's hint, returning home in time for the "surprise" birthday party planned by his daughters.
Under co-producer Rolf DeHeer's direction, DINGO is so light a film that even to call it a drama seems extreme. Dingo's mid-life crisis is less a melodramatic explosion waiting to happen than a slow, uncomfortable burn that builds to his spur-of-the-moment decision to fly to Paris; through a
script contrivance, he's unaware of Billy's invitation. The film's leisurely pacing complements its protagonist's low-key crisis while conveying the day-to-day rhythm of life in an outback village. But it also slows the action, along with plotting that, though complicated, is so routine that the
expected reappearance of Billy at the film's climax is often about all there is to maintain plot interest over much of its length.
That aside, however, the emotional restraint and respect DeHeer shows for his characters goes a long way towards making even the film's lulls tolerable at least and enjoyable on their own terms at best. Also helping are Denis Lenoir's cinematography, which gives the settings and locations a rich,
lived-in realism, and a very capable cast. Though perhaps more familiar to American audiences as the megalomaniacal villain of Sam Raimi's DARKMAN, Friels is actually on more familiar turf here in a much lighter role as an average guy trying to make peace with himself. Even better is Buday as his
long-suffering but quietly indulgent wife, a careworn working woman who still gives off an unforced glow of sensuality, making Dingo's decision whether to abandon her and move to Paris all the more compelling and difficult.
Despite being cast in what amounts to an extended cameo role, however, Davis dominates the film with an easy, charismatic authority that gives the action an urgency it sometimes badly needs while, needless to say, making the film's climactic jam session well worth the wait. leave a comment
