If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. -- Emma Goldman
For a movie set in Cuba in large part during the 1950s, there's surprisingly little revolutionary fervor to be found in Chico and Rita (2010, directed by Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, and Fernando Trueba). It's not a political movie, per se, though you can see politics seeping through the circumstances of our pair of doomed lovers. The personal is political, after all, but I'm probably reading too much into this. It's what I do. You should see me work with tea leaves. Then again, there's another revolution going on in this film, one not headed by Fidel Castro, in which the titans of jazz during the 1950s evolved the idiom beyond its dance-hall origins. THAT revolution, led by the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, is very MUCH central to Chico and Rita.