Early in
Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s Ballroom
Dancer, we see 33-year-old Russian ballroom dancing champion Slavik tell
his students that a dance between two people is an everyday story, not a big
drama. The goal, he tells them, is to get on the other person’s wavelength.
Slavik’s lesson is taken by Bonke and Koefoed’s film, which strives to get on
the physical and emotional wavelengths of an aging artist who can’t get back to
his salad days with former partner and reigning champion Joanna. His training
sequences with new (younger) partner and lover Anna are rendered in dynamic
camera movements that position the spectator as a surrogate partner in their tense
mating dance, which yields disappointing results in competition. The filmmakers
find a way to capture less obviously visually charged moments as well, framing
Slavik and Anna in two-shots that emphasize their distance from one another
even as they share the same space: Anna seems always to be hovering in the
background on her Blackberry, eager for a window out. Slavik’s journey is a
tricky one, then – a quest for self-mastery negotiated with another person who
has her own set of goals.
There’s plenty
of everyday drama here, but Ballroom
Dancer is hampered by Anna’s growing disinterest in training and presumably
the documentary. For those of us who can’t appreciate the technical nature of
ballroom dancing, she’s the only real access point to her brooding partner. Her
blankness, coupled with Bonke and Koefoed’s brave but misguided aversion to showing
archival footage of the Slavik-Joanna partnership, makes it hard to tell
whether Slavik has lost something physically or just can’t get it together with
his new partner. It’s not that he’s a poor
subject: his insistence on better articulating himself in conversation with one
of his many trainers (a rotating cast of counsellors) proves him to be as
pensive as he is graceful. But without a clear sense of his strategy or
personality, the film’s dourness takes its toll. **1/2/****
PROGRAMME: Special Presentations
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