Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is not a story: it’s a feeling. A clip of Nina Simone singing a few bars of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown”—”The rats have got your flour/Bad blood it got your mare/If there’s anyone that knows/Is there anyone that cares?”—plays several times in the film, and each time one is not sure why this song, why these lines, why at this moment in the documentary. And yet somehow it seems right to back the tragedy of Patrice Lumumba with a one-chord folk ballad about hunger and madness on a South Dakota farm. One could be less generous and accuse Johan Grimonprez of failure. Maybe he loved the jazz, burned to tell Lumumba’s story, mashed it all together and never quite got to coherence. Maybe. But the music and events of our own lives are also not scripted. If we’re to find meaning or understanding or ecstasy or even the simple impulse to feel and feel again, the accidental juxtaposition of chords and words and things will have to do. 9
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, directed by Johan Grimonprez, Onomatopee, 2004. Reviewed January 26, 2025.
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