The throw-pillow maxim “Dance like no one’s watching” assumes that, were anyone around, they wouldn’t be risking their lives observing a dance performance forbidden by the government. And not just because that disclaimer would be too long for the pillow.
In “Desert Dancer,” which inevitably and semi-accurately will be called the Iranian “Footloose,” Afshin (Reece Ritchie) longs to express himself through movement, but that’s difficult to do in a country where teachers can hit students for dancing in class and the morality police will do even worse. It’s 2009 at the University of Tehran, where Afshin finds like-minded pals—escorting Afshin into a hidden underground club, Ardavan (Tom Cullen) declares, “Welcome to the Ayatollah’s worst nightmare”—and founds a secret dance troupe. When Elaheh (Freida Pinto) auditions, the meaning she communicates without words almost gives a free pass to the movie to do and say whatever it wants.
Except, it doesn’t. Too often the true story-based, English-language “Desert Dancer” favors simple and tame to detailed and credible–and includes lines like, “Our country is like two parallel worlds running alongside each other,” which makes you want to scream at the screen, “So I guess that’s what makes them parallel!” Another one: “[Dance] was her oxygen; she couldn’t breathe without it.” All together in unison: “Ohhhhhh, so that’s why it was her oxygen.”
And while it wouldn’t have made sense for the movie to get too politically involved, the historically uninclined may understand what’s happening during the allegedly rigged Iranian elections only if they saw Jon Stewart’s directorial debut “Rosewater,” which ran parallel to the elections right alongside them. First-time feature director Richard Raymond could have given “Desert Dancer” a stronger sense of the motives for repression than just, “You can’t do that.”
That doesn’t diminish the longing to feel even a few minutes of freedom (if you bet that this movie would avoid a line like, “When I dance, I feel free,” you lost), or the beauty that rises above sorrow every time these characters interpret their experiences into motion. But that it all leads to an embarrassing climactic scene during which Iranian enforcers comically seem to say, “Let’s wait to stop this performance, maybe it will support our restrictive policies … nope, he’s protesting, shut it down!” should send you running to the gorgeous 2011 documentary “Pina,” which mostly let dance do the talking.
2 stars (out of four)
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