Watching an attractive young male-female couple go through a complicated routine, a bearded, older instructor (Kakha Gogidze) glowers. They should not be looking at each other; their gaze should be to the floor, he says. “There is no sexuality in Georgian dance,” he almost growls. The rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival of a new dancer, Irakli (Bachi Valishvili), who’s told to remove his earring almost immediately. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), the young male dancer who had been at work, looks at the new guy with trepidation and something else.
In the event you needed more foreshadowing, there’s a subsequent scene in the female changing quarters where dancers gossip about a male member of the troupe who was kicked out for being gay. Tbilisi, where this movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, is set and was shot, looks like a pleasant place to live, but also like a land out of time. The young members of the Georgian dance group all smoke like chimneys, and their world, and the world around them, has seriously retrograde ideas about human relations. This means trouble for Merab, who has more than a socially unacceptable new love on his plate: his family is struggling in poverty.
Gelbakhiani, the lead actor, has a lean physique, striking red hair and certain facial features that suggest he’d actually make a great Alfredo Linguini in a live-action remake of “Ratatouille,” not that such a thing should happen. He and the rest of the cast perform with conviction, and the whole movie is attractively, solidly put together. But its dramatic components, fraught as they are, are tepidly delivered. The movie catches fire only in its final scene, in which Merab expresses his rebellion in the language of dance, not words.
And Then We Danced
Not rated. In Georgian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
