The Dancer Upstairs

BB.5

(out of 5)

For all its passionate photography, score, convoluted political story and rich cast, this is a surprisingly unaffecting movie. Directed by John Malkovich, it stars Javier Bardem as a South American police detective who is on the hunt for a revolutionary named Ezequiel, a man gathering the people in a revolt against their fascist government. Bardem puts himself in quite a few dangerous situations looking for this man, taking pleasure only in the company of his loving wife and beautiful daughter. When he befriends and then later becomes attached to his daughter’s beautiful dance instructor (Laura Morante), he threatens his personal life as well as his professional one when she turns out to be connected to the wrong people. The atmosphere that Malkovich creates is terrific, hearkening back to the good old days of the Costa-Gavras political thrillers, but the screenplay is a rambling mess and the storyline too confusing.

Fox Searchlight Pictures, Lolafilms, Mr. Mudd, Antena 3 Televisión, Vía Digital

Spain/USA, 2002

Directed by John Malkovich

Screenplay by Nicholas Shakespeare, based on his novel

Cinematography by Jose Luis Alcaine

Produced by Andrés Vicente Gómez, John Malkovich

Music by Alberto Iglesias

Production Design by Pierre-Francois Limbosch

Costume Design by Bina Daigeler

Film Editing by Mario Battistel

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of new comments via email.

Notify me of new posts via email.