Flashdance
This
film may start with red letters on a black background and ominous keyboard
music and feature a man doing body double work for a woman by wearing a bad
curly wig, but that’s where the similarities to Blade Runner end. Don’t worry, there’s nothing girly in this
movie like dreams about unicorns or naked guys saying poems then releasing
doves into the sky. What you’ve really
got here is a retelling of Rocky for the Rocky 4 generation. It’s all the montages and camel toe you can
eat, so bring your appetite.
The
film is about Alex, a bi-polar teenage stealworker who dreams of becoming a
ballerina. She nurses her dream by
working nights at Mawby’s. Whatever a
mawby is I don’t know, it sounds like Australian slang or something. Mawby’s is a small roadhouse with a parking
lot for about eight vehicles that seems to find the budget to put on dance
shows with complicated choreography, props, stage effects, costumes and
original music.
Alex
puts on a routine about the controlling nature of media. During this routine she wears Kiss makeup
and freaks out to a strobelight television.
The blue-collar clientele seems to really appreciate these dance
routines for their social commentary which kinda surprises me. I always thought these types of guys would
settle for a television showing sports games, but I guess I shouldn’t be so
quick to judge.
Like
most blue-collar teenagers working two jobs with a pet dog, Alex has a lot of
free time and spends most of it thinking about the future in a spacious
hardwood-floored apartment. She knows
her dreams are bigger than what Mawby’s can provide her. She frequently goes down to the dance academy
where she walks through the giant marble museum room, through the crowded
marble corridor where all the ballerinas practice, all the way to the back of
the building into the main reception room and listens to the secretary talk
about the process for auditioning.
Alex
is troubled by watching her friends fail at their dreams, such as Ritchie, the
cook at Mawby’s, who says he dreams of being like Richard Pryor or Eddie
Murphy. There’s one pretty obvious
difference between Ritchie and those guys, and that’s that Murphy and Pryor
were funny. Ritchie’s style of humour is
to tell corny jokebook jokes and then laugh really hard at himself. Audiences still weren’t ready for this style
of humour when The Love Guru was released in 2008, so you can imagine
how ahead of his time Ritchie was in a movie made in 1983. Ritchie dates a figure skating waitress at
Mawby’s who’s Oksana Bauil tribute act also fails to find an audience.
In
between work and worry, Alex’s other main hobby is montages. Each one wackier than the next. In one she does aerobic dancing around her
apartment and her head becomes so sweaty that she looks like a sprinkler. There’s another one where she and her fellow
flashdancers exercise in that white room where they load stuff into the
matrix. The matrix exercise montage transitions
to another montage of her jamming with various breakdancers on the street,
which transitions to some sort of Buster Keaton homage involving Alex clowning
around in pantomime with a traffic warden in the street.
Aside
from working two jobs, exercising, taking care of her dog, supporting her
uncoordinated figure skater buddies, visiting an old German lady, and dreaming,
Alex also has a busy lovelife. She dates
the boss of her steel mill, a self-made tycoon and self-styled Howie Mandel
impersonator, Nick Hurley. They go on
your typical first date through an abandoned factory where she explains to him
that she doesn’t believe in choreography by putting his hand on her boob and
the romance just grows from there. They
survive tough times together such as when her bi-polar disorder causes her to
vandalize his home. They seem like
they’ve got all it all worked out during the semi-nude tuxedo lobster-sucking
scene but then their relationship hits shakey ground when he does something
really nice for her. My theory is that
he had to kill the old German lady to get Alex the audition at the dance
academy, but this is never explicitly stated in the film.
My
DVD of this film says it from the same director as Lolita. I have to say that this film doesn’t really
feel like as pure a Kubrick experience as usual. It’s probably closer to his more commercial
fare like The Shining. I would
expect Kubrick to cast an actual dancer or at least spring for Jennifer Beals
to take some dancing courses. The way
they try to cover up the various body doubles becomes one of the main sources
of entertainment during the film and hits its climax of ridiculousness during
the big audition at the end when they used four different body doubles (one of
which is obviously male) all with different dance specialties for the various
parts of her dance routine.
Overall,
I can really only call this film outstanding.
It may have only won one of the four Oscars for which it was nominated,
but I think it teaches us a lot of things about ourselves as welders of our
destinies. We all wear masks to work
with our passion because it’s so hot, but behind those masks we are real people
with real theme songs.
If you enjoyed this, check out
these other writings:
Paul Verhoeven goes all
about Eve!
Tom Cruise Respects
the Cocktail
A little bit of bottlework cinema from 1988
Two movies I wrote about a
topless boxer.