The result of “RuPaul's Drag Race” becoming an international franchise pop phenomenon is that drag performance has moved firmly from the LGBTQ fringes to the mainstream: as an art form with an audience that now spans all ages. demographic groups, it follows that it will become more inclusive on stage as well. That's the moral, at least, of "Dancing Queens," a lively, youth-oriented Swedish comedy that, in more ways than one, epitomizes the cultural broadening of drag in the post-RuPaul era.
Actress-turned-filmmaker Helena Bergström brings the joy of sequins and the free spirit of being you and me to this story of a young cisgender dancer who gets an unlikely break by hiding her gender identity to perform in a sick Gothenburg drag. . club, and should find a sizeable global audience when it debuts on Netflix at the start of Pride month. However, in its eagerness to please, the film ends up sidelining its own queer characters and narratives, a paradox it never quite resolves.
Stars: Colette Marotto, Donie Burch, Sabrina Strasser
The relative lack of sharpness in “Dancing Queens” is a disappointment for Bergström, best known to international audiences as the on-screen half of one of modern Swedish cinema's essential partnerships: with her husband, filmmaker Colin Nutley, she headlined a series of artistic hits from the 1990s (“House of Angels,” “The Last Dance,” “Under the Sun”) that ironically probed the country's social mores and sexual politics. Nutley serves as executive producer on "Dancing Queens," though the strong irony of her and Bergstrom's past glories isn't quite apparent. Keeping things snug in the family, her daughter Molly Nutley takes on the duties of the lead here, and to better effect: her cool, quietly controlled screen presence prevents many scenes from becoming pure schmaltz.
However, she has a difficult task: finding many nooks and crannies in the character of Dylan, a heroine portrayed from the start as a simply good girl who just wants to dance. We first find her tending the grave of her recently deceased mother (also a dancer, performed in golden flashblacks by Ellen Lindblad), singing a lilting rendition of Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" under her breath. Then we cut it to her double duty, making deliveries for her father's grocery store in a quaint fishing village of Bohuslän and offering high-energy dance classes to local moppets. Clearly, she has channeled her pain into a life lived predominantly for others.
Dylan's spunky grandmother (Marie Göranzon) wants Dylan to follow her (and her mother's) dreams of dancing for a larger audience, and chides her to head to Gothenburg to audition for a major. modern dance company The audition doesn't take place, but through a decidedly unconvincing chain of events, Dylan is convinced to take a cleaning job at the Queens transvestite club, where a power struggle is raging between the actor and the actor. star Tommy (Claes Malmberg), an old-school queen who prefers the cheesy disco routines of the '70s, and hip young choreographer Víctor (Fredrik Quiñones), who sees no reason why Dylan couldn't be the new queen of the block Hiding their gender from everyone else in the club, they develop a sneaky, crowd-pleasing new act.
Building off of this cheesy premise, building on equal parts "Flashdance," "Burlesque" and "Yentl," minus its collective camp value, "Dancing Queens" doesn't get anywhere especially surprising, and in nearly two hours, it take your sweet time to do it. Cut off from her gradually realized Terpsy-Korean ambitions, and despite Nutley's natural charm, Dylan remains an empty vessel: save for her strictly platonic friendship with Victor, there's little in the way of a personal arc to complement her predictable career progression. she.
Meanwhile, the story's most significant tensions play out in various subplots between its supporting gay characters, all of whom are reduced to stock figures. The specifically queer dynamics of intergenerational friction, relationship insecurities, and coming out anxiety are handled in extreme summary fashion away from the center of the film, without jeopardizing its lack of consistent, healthy sex—even dancing. never threatens to get dirty.
There's an interesting film to be made about women making their way into the drag scene, shuffling through complex layers of identity and gender identification, but this innocuous feel-good trifle hasn't exactly found it.
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