Leave it on the Floor | Review

Working nearly exclusively in television since the early 1970’s, Canadian born filmmaker Sheldon Larry is back with a sophomore feature, Leave It On The Floor, a drag ball musical heavily inspired by the landmark 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning. While Larry’s film certainly sports a pulsing rhythm in some of its excellent musical numbers, it unfortunately exhibits a distracting amount of low budget hallmarks that weigh it down as a run-of-the-mill niche picture. Yes, niche as in LGBT marketed cinema, a label the film so desperately tries to avoid yet fails markedly to employ any other technique than decry that the film is a party that everyone’s invited to attend.

The film opens in El Monte, California, ten weeks prior to the narrative. Brad (Ephraim Sykes), a 22 year old African American is caught watching gay porn on his computer and before you can blink his caricature mother (Metra Dee) kicks him to the curb. That very night, Brad runs into Carter (Andre Myers) at a gas station. They steal each other’s wallets as they flirt and Brad follows Carter into the underground Los Angeles ball scene. Once inside the narrative, we get a vague sense of what exactly the ball room scene consists of as we are introduced to a plethora of characters from various Houses (much like fraternities, performers live together and vie for awards in various categories). Our focus is on the House of Eminence, which Carter belongs to and is run by Queef Latina (Miss Barbie-Q), and includes other key players, Princess Eminence (Phillip Evelyn) and a strangely pregnant queen, Eppie Durall (James Alsop, choreographer for Beyonce). As the film explores a brief love triangle between Brad and two members of the house, we see him transform into a competitor himself.

Since the 20 years Paris Is Burning has been in existence it’s unfortunate that we’ve had to wait this long for another treatment of such compelling material. Regrettably, Leave It On The Floor can’t provide the substance this subject matter deserves. While the performers are all game (especially Alsop, strangely obsessed with pregnancy and the film’s most natural performer), Sheldon Larry surmised that it took six years to get the script and music together (three for each), and it seems lugubrious that so much time was spent on what resulted in a downright terrible script during absurd key sequences, particularly in any scene attempting to bring pathos, like Brad’s terribly scripted scenes with his overtly bitchy mother.

As good as the music is, the dialogue feels like a made for television film. Trying hard to be fabulous, it stands nowhere near the likes of predecessors The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) or even Too Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmarr (1994). The drag ball scene has been exploited without credit since Madonna mercilessly ripped off the concept of voguing (not unlike Elvis Presley’s exploitation of R&B) and it’s maddening to see that this film does little more than lift a concept from an excellent documentary. And yes, Beyonce borrows some of her moves from the underground ball scene, so the presence of her choreographer and also her musical director, Kimberly Bruce, is a welcome sign that some things have changed. But sadly, Leave It On The Floor fails to imbue these brave queens with the humanity and the fabulousness they deserve. To borrow a line from “A Song For Holly Woodlawn” by Kids on TV, “Glitter is cheap.”

Reviewed on September 15th at the 2011 Toronto Int. Film Festival – Canada First! Programme.

107 Mins.

Rating 2 stars