Only if you stop minding

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 2014)

It's enough for me when a film has spontaneity and spirit, what the Spanish call duende; it's okay to not be sophisticated, to not try to think up everything, there's no surer way after all of reaching your limits of observation (and all art is that) than an intellectual approach.
This observes in a simplistic way, a young dance hero at the local disco has to envision life ahead of just tonight. He works in a store by day, gets slapped upside the head by his Italian dad for being late for dinner and only minds that it messes up his hairdo, not the indignity.
By night though he commands the stage, life acquires shape, colorful order out of the swirl, and this is the beauty of dance and dance films in general; expression that ritually transforms scattered reality, and we see this wonderfully on the disco floor, room is cleared for him, he acts out with the whole body, and the moves are not stupendously choreographed such as you'd see in a Gene Kelly confection, they look goofy now, much parodized as silly.
I like this in much the same way I like Showgirls. Easy to be critical of both, to find the protagonists and overall worldview vacant and catty. Easy also to run into trouble in the effort to prop either as somehow profound satire that is above what it shows; it's not, even though the moral is creating a safe ordinary life outside the dance.
But it has a bit of the spirit that many films lack. This is all epitomized in Travolta; it's not necessarily in the moves, he could do it of course, but it's more than just suaveness that attracts, the dance scenes are few after all. It's in the eyes of innocent swagger, in not being afraid to stupidly dance at the edge of the Brooklyn bridge.