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The
Dancer Upstairs |
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Ed Richardson |
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The Dancer Upstairs leaves you convinced of one thing: John Malkovich needs to get out more. If you live with any lie for long enough, you start to believe in it. Malkovich, it seems, has spent so long with Hollywood’s clichés that he has mistaken them for reality. In the movies, middle-aged men are always falling in love with the wrong woman. In the movies, South American countries are always ruled by men with really really big cigars. So that’s what happens in The Dancer Upstairs. Clichés, in this film, become cause, effect, and explanation combined: no reason is proffered for Agustin Rejas (Javier Bardem) falling in love with the dancer Yolanda (Laura Morante), other than those which the stock roles of middle-aged-man and lonely-older-woman carry with them. If we hadn’t been conditioned by a lifetime’s movie-going to see it coming, their abrupt descent into mutual soppiness would be bemusing, confusing, and just a touch amusing (on screen, they have all the chemistry of two hung-over parrots). And therein lies the problem. By constructing his film around a series of clichéd sequences, rather than a coherent plot, Malkovich is following in a long-established Hollywood tradition – but he is also comprehensively undercutting the everyday, realist tone which he works so hard to establish elsewhere. His characters think, talk, speak and dress like ordinary people – but they are forced to act in accordance with the rules of Hollywood puppetry, and to continually revert to stereotype. The audience, in consequence, can believe in them as characters, but not as people. Sited awkwardly between the conventions of two genres of film-making, The Dancer Upstairs manages to be successful in neither. Nice try, Mr. Malkovich, but no cigar. You’ve done enough damage with those things already.
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