Save the Last Dance
***
Cinema
Releases - March 30, 2001
Certificate 12. 113 minutes. Directed by Thomas
Carter. Written by Duane Adler, Cheryl Edwards; from a story by Adler. Starring
Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas, Kerry Washington, Fredro Starr, Terry
Kinney.
The one movie opening this week that does not
involve infidelity is "Save the Last Dance". It covers familiar
territory -- young girl moves to the big city and ends up getting over her
hard past to make a wonderful achievement in performing arts -- but manages
to treat its plot with perfect sincerity and still end up
entertaining.
Julia Stiles, the wonderful actress from "Down
to You" and "State and Main", plays seventeen-year old Sara, who goes to
live with her dad in Chicago after the death of her mother. Mom was killed
in a car accident when driving to one of Sara's dance recitals, and in her
grief, Sara has vowed never to dance again.
The young heroine finds herself in an almost all-black
school, where she develops a friendship with an African-American peer named
Chenille (Kerry Washington) and a romance with her brother Derek (Seann Patrick
Thomas). The auras of Sara and Derek connect, of course, but they also share
high grades, painful backgrounds and a love of music.
Inevitably it all ends up with Derek helping Sara
overcome her fear of the stage so she can ace an audition for the Julliard
dance school; there are also a couple of sub-plots with generally predictable
directions. But the movie is made with textural intelligence; the interracial
aspect, for example, never feels tacked on, because the filmmakers don't
push it -- they put it there, know it's significant enough to stay in our
minds, and don't have to keep pointing it out as an issue. And Julia Stiles
is a wonderful female lead -- she has such presence that even in "Down to
You", which was a bog-standard teen romance, I noted that "the characters
are stupid, all right, but at least they're more convincingly alive
than most young folks in American movies". "Save the Last Dance" is a
surprisingly effective piece of work.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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