Strictly Ballroom

(Baz Luhrmann, Australia, 1992)

Australian movies tend to be, on their home turf, overpraised if they are successfully ordinary, or mercilessly savaged if they attempt anything unfamiliar. Given how difficult it is to get feature films both made and shown, it is little wonder that the merest sign of a local crowd pleaser is hailed as the greatest cinematic achievement since Citizen Kane (1941).

Such is the case with Baz Luhrmann’s directorial debut Strictly Ballroom – an energetic, enjoyable but finally rather ordinary film.

The plot is a campy variation on a hundred Hollywood musicals old and new. Scott (Paul Mercurio) is a rebellious young performer in the straitjacketed world of ballroom dancing. When his regular partner, Liz (Gia Carides), deserts him, Scott is forced to take on an awkward amateur, Fran (Tara Morice). Through her, he discovers the hot-blooded steps of Spanish dance.

This is a tale that pits brave individualism against cowardly conformism, passionate youth against decrepit adulthood. We might as well be watching Kevin Bacon in Footloose (1984) or Prince in Purple Rain (1984) – or, indeed, any one of a dozen modern, American teen musicals that have never received the critical adulation showered (in its homeland and in Cannes) on Strictly Ballroom.

The camp factor is more pronounced than most Aussie reviewers have been willing to acknowledge – complaints about Mercurio's “prissy” voice notwithstanding! Although Luhrmann is (by all accounts) not gay, his aesthetic identification with the camp aesthetic is total, and this brings on board a frank worship of the male body as well as a recurring note of shrill misogyny.

Being Australian-made, however, does mean that the movie has its own charming peculiarity. It mixes a downbeat, suburban melancholia – dancers rehearsing on a roof in the glow of an advertising billboard – with a feel-good, glamorous success story. And the cross-cultural, amorous tension between Mercurio and Morice lights up the screen.

Luhrmann (whose rise through the theatre scene of the ‘80s was veritably meteoric) aims for a jazzy (and, once again, highly camp) style somewhere between Pop Art and Francis Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982). The production design (by Luhrmann’s partner Catherine Martin) is rendered in gaudy, primary colours, with an ever-sweeping camera and unsubtle, rhythmic editing (by the celebrated Jill Bilcock). All the performers are in motion all of the time.

The souped-up soundtrack is mysteriously fixated on 1970s and early ‘80s pop: golden oldies (verging on the cornball) from Cyndi Lauper and John Paul Young. Most cast members are encouraged to sweat, grimace and shriek as if performing in a Kings Cross pantomime.

Still, despite some raggedness around the edges, it is a striking effort. Strangely for a film about dancing, its weakest moments are the big dance scenes, where the laid-on style overpowers the necessary concentration on bodily steps and movements.

Fortunately, the energy lost on the dance floor saturates the rest of the film, making Strictly Ballroom reasonably invigorating entertainment – within strictly circumscribed limits.

MORE Luhrmann: Moulin Rouge, Elvis, Romeo + Juliet

© Adrian Martin August 1992 / August 1993