And Then We Danced

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

AND THEN WE DANCED   ***

Levan Akin

2019

IDEA:  Merab is competing to land a place in a traditional Georgian dance ensemble, something that becomes complicated when he falls for a male rival.

BLURB:  Dance is a performance of tradition and an escape from it in Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced, a fairly formulaic but finally rousing paean to the irrepressibility of queer individuality. The ultra-conservative Georgian society depicted by Akin certainly tries its best to repress it, though. At nearly every turn, the young gay Merab is confronted by rhetoric that shuns him, his ambitions under attack by the entrenched attitudes and expectations that disavow his social and creative value. Most crushingly, he finds resistance even from the discipline that has anchored him since youth, as lectures from his stern dance director keep reinforcing what little place his “softness” has in an art based on doctrinaire, nationalist-historical notions of masculinity. Yet even during its most turbulent emotional valleys, And Then We Danced is never interested in drumming up pathos just to tell another story of tragic persecution. Seemingly using the film’s titular activity to inform its rhythm, Akin and his DP instead convey an agility and musicality of movement that is frequently elating, with an eclectic soundtrack of Georgian folk songs and ABBA accentuating the buoyant spirit of a young generation. Incredible newcomer Levan Gelbakhiani absorbs and reflects this energy through his limber body, communicating everything from the lightness of romantic ecstasy to the weight of pain and dejection in canny shifts of comportment. When the film is most constrained by narrative convention, his sinuous, insistent physicality and emotional transparency give him the tools he needs to break away.