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The Dancer Upstairs The Dancer Upstairs,
John Malkovich's first outing as a feature director, is a labor of love hobbled by a stubborn desire to eke a delicate love story out of a premise that all but sits up and begs to be treated as a political thriller. Adapted by British writer
Nicholas Shakespeare from his own fact-based novel about the search for
Shining Path guerrilla leader
Abimael Guzman, the movie is nothing if not timely, though it's unclear whether American audiences fearfully awaiting reprisal for our latest military adventure will fork out for a movie about organized terror.
Javier Bardem, an actor who ordinarily throbs with all manner of possibilities, comes on all stolid here as
Agustin Rejas, an idealistic,
Plato-reading lawyer-turned-policeman who's living a becalmed life with his beloved daughter (
Marie-Anne Berganza) and dim bulb of a wife (Alexandra Lencastre). Five years after a chance meeting with the populist guerrilla leader (
Abel Folk) who calls himself Ezequiel after the doomsaying sixth-century biblical prophet, Rejas is deputed to hunt him down and bring him to what passes for justice in a totalitarian regime.
The reference to the struggle between Peru's fascist regime and its even more vicious opposition in the 1980s couldn't be clearer. Malkovich and Shakespeare coyly set the movie in a generic Latin American country and graft onto the real-life melodrama of Guzman's many escapes and final capture, a romance between Rejas and his daughter's passionate ballet teacher, Yolanda (played by Italian beauty Laura Morante, who played Nanni Moretti's wife in The Son's Room). After a plodding start, The Dancer Upstairs achieves a fine, kinetic rhythm as it tracks the comeuppance of a revolution as violent and intimidating as the establishment it seeks to overthrow. Rejas' relationship with the elusive Yolanda, by contrast, feels stilted and artificially pressed into service for a treatise on the fate of goodness and love in a country stranded between totalitarianism of the left and right. Toward the end, the movie takes a turn for the preposterous when Rejas, weighing a run for president, makes a deal that surely confirms his candidacy for sainthood but casts doubt on his viability as a human being.
Blue Car was written and directed by Karen Moncrieff; produced by Peer J. Oppenheimer, Amy Sommer and David Waters; and stars Agnes Bruckner and David Straithairn; The Dancer Upstairs was directed by John Malkovich; adapted from the novel by Nicholas Shakespeare; produced by Andrés Vicente Gómez and Malkovich; and stars Javier Bardem and Laura Morante. Both films now playing at Edwards South Coast Village, Santa Ana.
