Before there was "Moulin Rouge" and Nicole Kidman's Chanel commercial, there was a little movie about ballroom dancing.
Well, calling "Strictly Ballroom" little is a bit deceptive.
Sure, Baz Luhrmann's first movie centers on an unlikely pair who fall in love, overcome numerous obstacles and find success. Scott Hastings, an up-and-coming amateur ballroom dancer, horrifies his family and fellow dancers when he improvises some steps at a competition. His partner ditches him.
In comes Fran, a wallflower who helps out around the studio run by his mother and her former dance partner. They set out to win the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix with Scott's "new steps" and some help from Fran's family.
Despite its relatively simple premise, the movie winds and rewinds around a number of characters, back stories and side plots. This is the kind of movie where you notice something new every time you see it.
I should know. I saw the movie at least 27 times in the theater. I stopped counting at 27 viewings, when several bedraggled prints of the film finally made it to Albuquerque's dollar theaters. Those prints were missing different bits of the movie, but that didn't stop me from going.
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I know my mother and I weren't the only ones to develop a bizarre obsession with the movie. As we settled into the theater day after day, we kept seeing the same people.
I remember two men who sat in the middle of the theater and a woman with a particularly memorable laugh. I was the high school girl who sat with her mother in the middle of the third row.
It was a silent kind of cult - one where we would see each other night after night and kind of smile sheepishly at each other.
Luhrmann's movie began as a stage play in 1986. His theater group revived it a number of times.
Maybe that explains the film's intricacies. "Strictly Ballroom" isn't just about Scott and Fran, but about the world they inhabit. And Luhrmann creates the world with the kind of loving attention that comes from spending years working and reworking a story.
When the co-owner of his mother's studio is lecturing Scott, he chides one of the beginning dancers for his arm placement. Throughout the film, that guy has his arms all over the place when he's dancing.
It's that kind of attention to detail that makes "Strictly Ballroom" so special.
Luhrmann uses a number of stylistic techniques to emphasize that what the audience is seeing is a movie, just as he does in his other two films. We know it's a film. The characters know it's a film. But it's also detailed and rich enough to make us feel like we're watching real people.
Zany, sorta crazy people, but I'm not one to talk. After all, seeing a movie 27 times doesn't exactly make me normal, either.
