Post by Vits on Aug 1, 2021 7:12:06 GMT
DANCING QUEENS is one of those movies where the protagonist (in this case, a young woman named Dylan Pettersson) pretends to be a member of the opposite sex, but I give it credit for not following all the tropes one would expect. And I don't just mean something small like creating an alias (her name is unisex), but also that her love interest (Victor) knows who she is from the start. The reason why she comes up with this plan is because she wants a gig at a drag club. Since their goal is to look like women, she gets hired after a short dance audition. With this kind of set-up, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the truth eventually comes out. However, the movie frames it as if Dylan is wrong for the mere fact of lying without taking the context into consideration. You see, hiring women for this kind of show would be more practical than spending time and money on makeup and other things, so why don't gay men just do that? Because they want to express themselves in a way they can't do in many places. Women on the other hand can put on a dress and dance pretty much anywhere they choose. I'm not saying women should never be allowed to participate (I'm not gay, so I couldn't decide that even if I wanted to); I'm saying that, if you're going to cover a topic related to gender and sexuality, you need to look at it from all the relevant points of view. To be fair, even if screenwriters Helena Bergström (who's also the director) and Denize Karabuda had acknowledged that Dylan seemed to be appropriating another culture, it would still be a clichéd and forgettable story. Dylan is a bland character, but at least Molly Nutley and Fredrik Quiñones have chemistry, and the pacing is good enough that I was never bored. Now, I'm going to talk about the soundtrack, and I'm afraid that Abba's 1976 classic wasn't included, making me wonder why such a title was chosen for this movie. LOST IN MUSIC by Sister Sledge is played during a scene that presents a couple of plot developments at once. They already come off as rushed due to the script, but this track makes it worse, because it doesn't match a lot of the characters' words and actions. I feel like any song could've been played during the opening credits. We hear I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY by Whitney Houston, but editor Philip Puljak does nothing to make that 1987 hit complement the images. By the way, what's this song even doing here? The movie's aesthetics is all about disco music, while this is a pop song that came out several years after that genre had lost popularity.
5/10
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You can read comments of other movies in my blog.
5/10
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You can read comments of other movies in my blog.