Dollar Mambo

The third part of Leduc's loose trilogy (after Barocco and Latino Bar) is a kind of Mambo-ballet, a more or less wordless series of dance cabaret sequences, intercut with short narrative sections, centred around the 'Panama Saloon' in a small town on the Canal Zone in the period leading up to the American invasion. One of the group of entertainers, a mime artist, warns about the penalty of silence over this sad episode of Panamanian history; and certainly the last part of the movie (as soldiers descend on the club and then have sex and snort cocaine with their masks still on) enacts events that are nasty in the extreme. A weird entertainment.