BEFORE: OK, this film was completely unplanned, it was NOT on my list of films to watch this year, which of course recently I finished working out, all the way to Christmas. But I saw in the IMDB trivia for "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool" that two of that film's stars were reunited on screen, having both appeared in "Billy Elliot" years before. And I was about to watch "Defiance" and kick off some World War II programming, but since I've never seen "Billy Elliot", and heard good things about it, AND found that it was currently available on Netflix, I figured I'd drop it in here, between two other films with Jamie Bell.
This means that now I'll really have to double-up on documentaries next week, in order to hit my July 4 film right on target AND I'll have to find a third film to drop from the line-up. I've been running with a schedule that's JUST a bit over-packed, and I knew I had to drop two films, but now it's three. Hey, you never know, a film could suddenly become unavailable for streaming, so there's always a chance I'd have to cut down the line-up anyway. I think I know which three films I want to drop - I have to sort of look for three in a row with the same actor, and just postpone the middle one - but I'll deal with this once I make it through the documentary chain, which will run from mid-June to mid-July now.
THE PLOT: A talented young boy becomes torn between his unexpected love of dance and the disintegration of his family.
AFTER: I didn't really have anything for Pride Month, it's not an occasion I tend to celebrate or mark, but perhaps this will serve. It's not really a gay film, but there's plenty of material here that questions what it means to be a boy, with depictions of outdated gender stereotypes, like thinking that boys should play sports and girls should study ballet, and the reverse is somehow unacceptable. The coal miner's strike seen in this film apparently sets it in the year of 1984, and that's an early year for the cause of gay rights, and well before the wave of teen gender fluidity that we're seeing now, with not just trans people but also people identifying as gender-neutral or using the "they" pronouns - honestly I find a lot of it to be nonsensical, but then if I go and say that, then I'm being insensitive to people who identify that way. We're in an age where everyone is supposed to love everyone, but that doesn't extend to homophobes and insensitive people, so it's a bit hypocritical to think that its OK to bully someone online for being queer-phobic or try to force someone to be more accepting.
But then again, this isn't a gay film at all, because it's just about a boy who wants to study ballet instead of boxing. And he declares several times that he's not a "poof", as the Brits say - he's not out to prove a larger point about pre-conceived gender roles or change the way that boys and girls spend their extra-curricular time, perhaps he's just bad at boxing. Though he claims to be good at it, which seems weird, because what he does in the ring seems a lot closer to dancing than boxing. I don't know, I didn't really feel that the shift from one activity to the other was that well-explained - like, did he want to hang out with girls because he felt "girly", or did he want to get close to girls because he was attracted to them? Or both, or neither? We don't really get inside Billy's head until much later in the film when he's applying to ballet school and FINALLY talks about his urge to dance, and how dancing makes him feel. Why wasn't this mentioned up at the start of the film? Why keep it ambiguous for so long? I wish they'd made the point clearer that Billy's FATHER wanted him to learn how to box, and that Billy himself wasn't all that into it.
But then again, this kind of is a gay film, because Billy has a friend named Michael, who likes to wear his sister's dressed and put on make-up - apparently so does his dad, when he thinks no one else is home. And Michael might be hanging out with Billy because he's attracted to him, and that's fine, even if Billy doesn't feel the same way. I know, I shouldn't confuse being a transvestite with being gay, those are two separate things, only the movie doesn't treat them as separate, so now I can't either. We know a lot more about gay and trans issues than we did back in 2000, I think, only I sometimes wonder if we've gone too far, because I think we already are indulging kids way too much, so letting them cross-dress and get gender reassignment surgery seems in some ways like the ultimate in renegade indulgent behavior, and part of me does miss the bygone days that were much simpler, when only girls wore pretty colors and boys played with trucks, not dolls.
And then at the end of the film (sorry, SPOILER ALERT) Billy is seen grown-up, and dancing in a version of "Swan Lake" where all of the parts are played by men. Yes, this film looked 15 or 20 years into the future and correctly predicted how much gender-bending would be going on in the world of entertainment.
By some logic it's been something of a cart-before-the-horse thing, I think - after the push in the 1990's and early 2000's to create more gender-neutral toys and fashions, we're seeing a world now with much more gender fluidity as a possible result. Are there more queer teens and gender-neutral attitudes today because that's a more accurate reflection of the way things really are, or are things that way simply because teens have been allowed and encouraged over time to develop and self-actualize in those directions? Or, just hear me out here, are there more queer teens because it's some form of trendy, which in my opinion might belittle the whole situation just a bit? I remember David Bowie talking about how he felt a lot of pressure in the 1960's to present himself as a transvestite/queer artist, and then over time he felt that wasn't really the whole story, and sort of outed himself as a straight person? So I maintain that's it's possible in these modern times for kids to get caught up in the Pride movement and the perceived "coolness" of LGBTQ culture, and a (probably small) percentage could conceivably be coerced into gay culture when it doesn't represent who they really are inside. The problem with all revolutionary dogma is that can only replace the rigid outdated guidelines of the past with potentially equally rigid forward-thinking ones.
But let's get back to "Billy Elliot", which I now realize is serving as a good lead-in for Father's Day, since a main focus is the relationship between Billy and his coal-mining father, who of course is also very strict and conservative, and doesn't take the idea of his son being a ballet dancer well at all. First he forbids it, since what would the other blokes at the union hall think? Plus Billy's older brother is the leader of the striking miners, and he's also very against the concept of men dancing ballet - but come on, the most famous ballet companies in the world have both male and female dancers, and those men have to come from somewhere. It could just as easily have been that Billy wanted to become a chef, or a fashion designer, or a doctor - the main argument concerns how "girly" the ballet is, but the family had no money to send him to a special school for any career. So his father crosses the picket lines, because once he does decide to support Billy's dancing, he's got to raise the tuition somehow.
It's one thing to find the career path that really speaks to you, it's another thing entirely to pay for it. How many people find their bliss and decide to devote themselves to one particular cause or line of work, only to have to give it up because they can't afford the training? You've got to pay the cost to be the boss. I remember back when I was in junior high and these new things called "computers" came into my life, I took a summer course in the BASIC programming language, and for a 13-year old kid to start to understand how computers function, that was a big deal. So the next summer, my parents enrolled me in a summer computing course at MIT, of all places, to study what seemed like the next logical step, which was called Pascal. After one class, I knew I was out of my depth, and I had to approach my parents and tell them I hadn't understood a thing, and I didn't want them to waste their money on classes where I wasn't learning. How would my life have been different if I'd stuck with the class and tried just a bit harder? Could I have become a millionaire programmer in Silicon Valley? A year or two later I thought I might give filmmaking a go, and there was that feeling that I was making a better choice for myself, but perhaps that feeling was an illusion, since I'll never get rich working in the medium of independent filmmaking.
Like many films, from "Beetlejuice" to "King Kong", this film has now been turned into a stage musical, which ran in London from 2005 to 2016 and on Broadway from 2008-2010. Eventually everything will get turned into a stage musical, from "Pretty Woman" to "Heathers", and from "Shrek" to "Groundhog Day". Can "The Lego Movie: The Musical" or "Crazy Rich Asians: The Musical" really be far off?
Also starring Julie Walters (also carrying over from "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Gary Lewis (last seen in "Joyeux Noel"), Jamie Draven, Jean Heywood, Stuart Wells, Nicola Blackwell, Colin Maclachlan, Mike Elliott, Billy Fane, Janine Birkett, Charlie Hardwick, Joe Renton, Matthew James Thomas, Stephen Mangan (last seen in "Rush"), Patrick Malahide (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Neil North, Lee Williams, Adam Cooper, Merryn Owen, Zoe Bell.
RATING: 5 out of 10 white tutus
No comments:
Post a Comment