`Strictly Ballroom' is a feel-good movie

By Jane Freebury

The film Strictly Ballroom (Baz Luhrmann, 1992) was not screened in local movies. The film was shown during the Australia Today Indonesia '94 Festival.

JAKARTA (JP): When this lively film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in France, people were seen dancing in the aisles.

It's hardly surprising. With the audience joining in, Strictly Ballroom is infectious: it makes you feel like jumping up and joining the screen world.

It is -- like the Australian films, Crocodile Dundee, Reckless Kelly, and the American, The Sound of Music -- a feel-good movie.

The film lets the dancing to the talking, and keeps to a plot easily summarized in a few lines: In the world of competition ballroom dancing, a talented young man, a rebel dancer named Scott, chooses "plain Jane" amateur partner, Fran, to dance his own unapproved steps with him in official competition.

Thereby, he confronts the moldy old dance world, and prevails. Does he win the dance championship? We don't know, but at the end he has won the crowd over.

Strictly Ballroom is based on a student production for stage and was developed by its original cast at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (Australia). In the 1980s, it toured Australia and went overseas, winning prizes in Czechoslovakia for its production and for the direction of Baz Luhrmann, who also directs the film.

It opens with a big, lush musical score over red curtains. These part to reveal dancers silhouetted backstage, moving in slow motion, silent, ghostlike. This brief scene suggests that we travel back in time to the romantic, comic dance fantasies of other eras. We indulge in our nostalgia and give ourselves over to the spirit of the film.

Suddenly, the dancers turn towards us and enter the auditorium, bringing with them the color, movement and finally the sounds of a bygone world.

Oh course, there are those who watch and just don't respond to the film. But Strictly Ballroom asks to be judged on its own terms, not as an accurate representation of reality.

Dance

Romantic comedies (as Strictly Ballroom is described in the press notes) and dance musicals have often been zany, exaggerated and excessive. Films showcasing lead actors and their dancing prowess go back as far as the early 1930s and to the years immediately after sound technology was introduced.

Sound and a wider cinema screen brought the musical genre to movie audiences, and with them came the synchronized dance routines, the songs, the wild costumes and often wonderful production design of a new era. The couple joined together in a series of flowing steps, faultlessly executed, became an icon of the silver screen.

Male lead dancers such as Jimmy Cagney, Fred Astaire and John Travolta swept us away, as does Paul Mercurio in Strictly Ballroom.

In the early sequences of Strictly Ballroom we are introduced to the gallery of characters who want to hold Scott down -- his parents Shirley and Doug (or at least one of them), his dancing partner Liz Holt, and no one less than Barry Fife, the president of the dance federation.

It seems as though no one will support Scott, only Fran, a bespectacled and awkward beginner. Such an offer of assistance could be unthinkable to a good-looking guy like Scott, but our hero is not a chauvinist, and together the two of them start a dancing relationship, kept out of sight from the rest of the dance world.

This bright new team gradually ushers in change in the world created by the film. And eventually, we receive a welcome escape from the booming authority of Barry Fife (the evergreen Bill Hunter), from the dresses with their flesh-nipping straps and clashing colors and from the hilariously rigid hairstyles and the woeful taste in cosmetics.

This postmodern romp is cheerfully unscrupulous when it comes to its sources -- fashion and style of one era are thrown in with styles from another, with little attention to authenticity.

The mood of conservatism and resistance to change is of the 1950s, while the film pays homage to the dance musical and romantic comedy of the 1940s; the "look" is "retro" circa 1950s- 1960s -- and yet the film is supposed to be "set" in the 1980s!

But as a whole, Strictly Ballroom is a slippery, eclectic entity -- without place or time, and thoroughly (post)modern.

Problems

The film has some problems. Its stage origins are patent, with much of the exaggeration and character projection necessary for stage work retained. This is a mistake. Camera close-ups, lens work and angles can describe a character in film far better than the angry, shouting faces which predominate the first half of the movie.

It is the director's first feature, so perhaps this and the film's stage origins left the filmmakers relying too heavily on dramatic stage acting styles and not enough on the strategies offered by film.

Strictly Ballroom was voted Best Film at the Australian Film Institute awards in 1992 and was a popular success. Of course, not everyone loved it. A reviewer in Cinema Papers (an Australian film culture magazine) described the film as being "one-dimensional" and without "subtlety."

If you insist on watching fine cinema craft, depth of characterization and sophisticated humor, Strictly Ballroom is not for you.

But, if you can allow some exhilarating dance sequences, some unfamiliar glimpses of urban Australia, the familiarity of (cliche) sight gags and some blunt humor...

And if you don't mind a few predictable moments (you know the stories of Cinderella, the Ugly Duckling and Jack the Giant Killer), you can let yourself enjoy this little kernel of fun.