This gently bent Belgian comedy about a pair of dance-happy schoolteachers (co-writers/directors Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, going by their real first names) is only 77 minutes long. Even at this brief running time, however, Rumba seems distended (unchecked whimsy tends to curdle pretty quickly). But it still works as a series of isolated, intermittently ingenious (and largely dialogue-free) vignettes that suggest some combination of Kaurismaki, Tati and So You Think You Can Dance.

The film peaks during the opening credits, where the pasty protagonists enact an elaborately choreographed, Latin-inflected pas de deux. The sequence is meant to hang over the rest of the film, as our nimble protagonists are laid low by an automobile accident; Fiona loses a leg, Dom loses his memory and their once-fluid domestic/dancefloor double act becomes a study in staggering catastrophe.

There’s surely pathos in this premise, but Rumba doesn’t tug too hard: the self-consciously flat compositions and candy-colored mise en scene give it a pop-up fable quality that offsets the underlying melancholy.