Sensual and fun

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2014)

The vacation resort as adolescent life. The girl, the fairytale princess, has gone with her family. She finds a senile, airbrushed safety (games by the pool, dinner parties) that makes everything available, except for the real stuff that make the heart beat faster. It takes place in the early 60s with Vietnam a faint worry, but just as well speaks to its own time of all the pleasing comfort and diversion that money can buy.
She enters his dancing space instead, tiptoeing one evening out of the family bungalow and across a path to the big house. She finds rhythm, bodies grinding, cessation of etiquette and empty chitchat and in their place passion and soul; sex of course, dance as discovery. He enters her dancing space and finds in her the same zest and soul, a desire to help others and get tangled up in their problems rather than coast through like the other vacationers.
She a pure girl, shy but eager. He a movie hunk, tortured but good. Superficial strokes for the rest of the characters; smug Ivy League waiter, vacant sister. The sex is that soft movie sex where silhouettes are caressed against an orange bedroom glow. The fallacy of realism may keep some from enjoying it, but that would be a pity.
What movie is real? It's all about the point-of-view, the point from which we view. Here it's the girl's on her journey to womanhood, the story of meeting someone like him, a movie hunk with a dancer's body who needs her nurturing, something she would dream about.
Would the sex be more 'real' if we were shown a cold slapping of thighs? The recent Life of Adele comes to mind. It would be if sex was merely bodies writhing together. Of course it's a commercial decision to not show for example nudity, and to offer us simple dilemmas in the story. But it does also embrace what this girl covets; touch, intimacy.
The princess can leave all this behind on her way to the safe life. Roman Holiday with dance.