The Dancer Upstairs | Review

Directorial debut paints a Peru-like portrait without pretension.

The growing trend among actors these days seems to be in this transitional phase of their careers, where they once made their moves in front of the camera and are now making there way behind it. Veteran actor John Malkovich (Being John Malkovich) gets a taste for the full menu of activities, which include the fun aspect of watching dailies and sleeping in the grueling editing room. With his adaptation of Nicholas Shakespeare novel The Dancer Upstairs, Malkovich shows his strength for understanding the artistic nature of cinema.

Forget about the usual political thrillers, as this is only a thread of the picture which centers on an anonymous town inside an unidentified Central American country. There is no finger pointing in this film, but corruption within these types of governments and the revolutionary shows of aggression and movements are definitely the focal point of the picture. Filtered through an hour glass, this is a slow-paced feature drama where each moment is riddled with either meaningless details or important clues when considering the origins of the grotesque violent nature of the hotbed setting or the understanding of the links between the characters. The story begins in the mountainous regions with a minor border-crossing incident where a figure literally dances and dodges trouble and then the story is fast-forwarded 5 years into the future. Javier Bardem Before Night Fallsstars as an undercover-cop and crusader hoping for some sort of justice in the place he calls home. His nemesis is a terror brought about by a multiple message Ezekiel. Thematically, the film is about intrusions, where Western culture and Women’s magazines and its ideas infiltrate into setting and nest the egg that causes the movements found in the Latin Americas- also known as revolutions. This is also about the invasive nature of relationships which is smartly embedded into the romantic elements and is counter-balanced with the bloody tensions between corruption found inside poverty, political governments and the local enforcement versus military.

A beautiful long shot that sees a blockade and a sea of corrupted military seizing an important piece of evidence from a very frustrated cop this simply comments on the uphill battle that is fought in this countries. If you’re expecting to see a Harrison Ford type of character chasing the streets with a gun you simply won’t find this here. The mixtures of truthful violent images are certainly shocking, but what is more disturbing is the amount of forced English used by a cast of actors who have so much trouble speaking the language. Why bother, just slap in the subtitles or ad an English character which forces the group of characters to converse with say a diplomat from abroad, thus the hard to decipher accents become perfectly acceptable. Like a pot of boiling water, there are a number of tensions which rise but quickly die down-the thriller aspect is kept at a bare minimum with a piano-bar suspense that creeps into the relationship between Bardem and the Laura Morante’s (The Son’s Room) character. There are some honest portrayals here and I’m glad to see that we can rummage through such pictures without the need for super-human characters. On the flip-side there seems to be a large amount of unnecessary scenes thus making this an extremely long marathon of watching empty white spaces in the plot movement. Malkovich juxtaposes his deliberate pacing with the bloody trail of events which makes for some mild detective work for the viewer.

Malkovich certainly works hard at creating a moody ambiance here and he succeeds with the natural pastels of city textures, but I got the feeling that the setting wasn’t fully utilized to its potential. The idea is there, and the stories of the liaison and the political situation are smartly intertwined together, but I feel that a shorter version of The Dancer Upstairs with a focus on making the film tick with a low-brow energy could have benefited the film and make the whole game of paying attention to what is important to withhold as information and what is not-not such a chore. This is a worthy first effort, but by the year’s end it won’t be remembered as the smartest political drama of the year.

Rating 2.5 stars