Starring
Antonio Banderas as real-life ballroom dance teacher Pierre Dulaine, this is a
fairly predictable, frequently enjoyable, fully fictionalized story about a
group of high school detention students who learn dance and etiquette.
One of 2005’s more
charming films was Mad, Hot Ballroom, a documentary about some of the
kids enrolled in a New York City program that teaches elementary students to
foxtrot, waltz, and tango. Here, Antonio Banderas portrays Pierre Dulaine, the
creator of that program, but the setting has been transformed into an urban
high school basement. Presumably, mainstream adult audiences wouldn’t want to
watch a film about children. In this reworking, Dulaine, who runs a dance
studio, agrees to supervise detention students and reluctantly persuades them
to partner up. (It’s never explained why the same students have detention every
day.) You’ve probably seen this kind of movie before, except that it was about
a professor, or a sports coach, or a music teacher (e.g. Music of the Heart).
That is, the film is an inspirational story more than a dance movie, geared as
much as possible to fans of hip-hop, not ballroom.
The big finale at the end
does feature some good moves, but it’s silly on a dramatic level and insists on
replacing the music the characters are hearing with something more modern, as
if the audience would run screaming from the theater if forced to endure Irving
Berlin, or Gershwin. In terms of portraying urban reality, it’s not Boys N
the Hood. The transformative power of dance was not, to me, as clear as it
could have been, but I liked the students, even if I can already barely
remember them. The best thing, though, was Banderas the actor and Dulaine the
character. Even if everything around him is Hollywood make-believe, and even if
Banderas has the wrong accent, I felt like this might be like someone who
inspired real students.
posted 9/4/13
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