Carlos Vargas
MOVIE REVIEW
Melody of Love (2023)
What this strange, quiet misfire has to offer is its unusual location – Addis Ababa. The concept of middle-class people living ordinary lives in an urban African setting is still somewhat unusual in Western cinema, but the good news is things are changing. “Melody of Love’s” writer-director Edmundo Bejarano is Bolivian, with no obvious connection to Ethiopia, and pleasantly uninterested in poverty porn or cruel stereotyping. The terrible trouble is he forgot to give his movie a plot, and left both his protagonist and his audience twisting in the wind.