Influential beyond quality

Rating: 3/10 (29 September 2012)

An 18-year old female welder (what the...?) Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals), who doubles up as a flashdancer at a night club, reluctantly falls in love with her employer, the always well-groomed jaunty Nick Hurley (Michael Nouri). Self-taught she dreams of entering a ballet school, something seemingly impossible given lack of any recognised dance schooling. In true fairy tale fashion we glide through specious drama involving an elder ballerina, a piteous stand-up comedian slash cook, a waitress turned stripper and the inevitably beguiling rags-to-riches princess meets her prince.
Whishing through a tirade of dance sequences (including two ice-skating routine) about 30% of the movie consists of musical numbers, whilst the remaining runtime is rudimentary adhesive pretending to tell a story, with the dramatic excuse burdening the lead actress Beals, who has endless enamour and childishly vampiric sex appeal. The dances themselves are undeniably the highlight, most dimly-lit and featuring fast-editing montage, aimed predominantly at hiding the fact, that all sequences were performed by doubles. Inadvertently this gives "Flashdance" a surprising allurement, which came to be deeply influential to future cinema and video-clips, making the movie carry much more weight in filmmaking history then the banality of its story would even deem possible.