The Dancer Upstairs
**1/2
Cinema
Reviews - Week of February 7, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. USA/Spain.
133 minutes. Directed by John Malkovich. Written by Nicholas Shakespeare;
based on the novel. Starring Javier Bardem, Laura Morante, Juan Diego Botto,
Elvira Minguez, Alexandra Lencastre, Oliver Cotton, Luis Miguel Cintra, Javier
Manrique, Abel Folk, Marie-Anne Verganza.
Militant revolutionaries rant hard about working
for the interests of ordinary people. Totalitarian governments do the same
thing. The former lot are drunk with their own pretentious ideologies, believe
they have hit upon perfect solutions for using the state to hand things out
properly, and think that their bully tactics are for a higher cause. Suited
demagogues are just as confident -- they see hard-line control of government,
including heavy use of armed forces and social repression, as the only frank
way of keeping populations in order.
Both are stupid and evil. Once you start associating
yourself with extremism, you drift away from common sense and the common
man becomes less relevant than your own view of what is best for him. Someone
once said, in a quote whose exact wording escapes me right now, that the
greatest tyranny always comes from men attempting to create their vision
of utopia.
"The Dancer Upstairs" takes place
in an unnamed South American country, where one honest policeman has been
assigned to find a revolutionary leader named Ezequiel. The radical group
has been hanging dogs from lamp posts and indoctrinating the countryside,
and slowly and silently consolidating their position. The authorities are
only now becoming getting clued into the operation, and just in the nick
of time, as it seems they're about to strike big.
The police officer is a quiet, sharp and collected
former lawyer played by Javier Bardem, the famous Spanish actor who received
an Oscar nomination two years ago for "Before Night Falls". He studies evidence
gradually, finding that those who are attempting to overthrow the government
are inspiring fear in their strongholds and empty fanaticism among their
hardcore supporters. The government rushes to get troops on the streets,
seek out and assassinate suspected rebels and generally get in the way of
the police investigation. Bardem does the best and most decent job he can
in the face of unhelpfulness from both sides.
This is the directorial debut of John Malkovich,
who does not appear in the film, and shows himself to be a loose but not
untalented filmmaker. Long stretches in "The Dancer Upstairs" are terrific
-- Malkovich uses a lot of darkness, but also a lot of strong Latin American
colour; his film looks strong, and he knows how to compose frames and use
quiet sounds to create lyrical anticipation and suggest more than is happening
onscreen.
Settings and themes are interesting. Dialogue
is tense, sometimes undercut by dry wit: After some important government
officials have been killed in a theatre performance entitled "Blackout",
one of Bardem's bosses notes, "Good thing it wasn't 'Evita', or we wouldn't
have a government." And the intense gravitas of Bardem is absorbing -- he
has a strong, sincere look about him that seems to suggest without effort
the inner workings of a man struggling to calmly do the right
thing.
But eventually I got fed up with the movie. The
slow pacing becomes methodical, and the final stretches, which should be
lingering and reflecting on emotional threads, simply end up ponderous. The
title refers to a relationship between the cop and his daughter's dance teacher,
whose dynamics I found hard to follow, perhaps because they are motivated
by the attractiveness of the actors and the need for the screenplay to find
a counterpoint to the character of Bardem's shallow wife, rather than an
actual human connection. As for the final revelation regarding the dancer...
is it me, or was that obvious from the beginning? Maybe it's supposed to
be? If so, why wasn't more made of it?
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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